Tal I don’t know why energy companies insist on being financial planners, I’d rather just pay the monthly bill with monthly meter readings personally.
I think it’s a nonsense and an insult, that we effectively have what in BT was called a “budget account” back in the day, which we only put bad payers on.
Now, it’s either “budget account”, or if your electricity biller allows it pay the actual bill monthly (but you pay more for the privilege). How on earth did OFGEM and more importantly various governments allow this! It’s definitely not in consumer interests and has this nonsense of credit balances (I’ve been in credit for around £1000 for years, finally British gas are refunding me).
Even with such simplistic billing, the companies still make a mess of it as well!!
back in 1984 BT was producing around 27 million bills and had a machine (in Newcastle) that handled cheque payments mailed in. it would turn the envelope the right way up, open it, remove the contents, find the cheque, remove the paper clip, staple etc,,scan the check (confirm it was filled in correctly and the amount), find the bill slip, scan that. Then it was all recorded as a payment. Stored and if later the check bounced, recorded as a non payment.
I watched it work and it was so fast it was a blur. I think it handled around 6 million payments or more a year which is 16K per day, but of course it didn’t work every day, only on billing runs!!
In 1984 27 million meters in exchanges were photographed every bill run (1K per film strip, 10 strips per exchange), and manually input with less than 0.1% error rate. In 1985 that process of reading the film strips was automated (MORIS, Meter Optical Recognition Information System), with actually a slightly higher error rate.
Now, the electricity companies, couldn’t find their backside with a torch.
