Electricity bill

They have strange ways of working. My last two suppliers allow me to "manage" my direct debit provided I give them a meter reading. However they allow me to reduce it to a level where the payment will gradually increase the amount I owe them which seems mad to me. The cycle is

I just keep the monthly payment as low as it will go and settle up if needed at the end of the period.

Agreed. So far, BT's billing was the worst, and was one of the reasons I moved away.

One of the problems of having multiple electricity suppliers is that we end up with multiple billing systems, each with their own problems and idiosyncrasies. I do wonder whether there should be a standard billing system using what ever supplier and tariff you have agreed to.

That would never do. Such companies make much of their profits by setting out to confuse their customers.

To be fair, I think the regulator has been leaning on them to provide more useful info, in a more standardised way.

Currently wading through OVO energy bills because it *looks* to me as though they screwed up following a meter change. It's proving much more difficult than I expected it to be, but at least I have been able to download monthly statements going back several years from the web.

I've given up with supplying online readings. Irrespective of whether I have or not, we always get the meter read.

In fact, I believe it's been read more frequently since we switched to online tariffs than ever before.

You have obviously never encountered nPower then.

This is precisely why I made them promise in writing to take any direct debit quarterly and after they had a real reading. There have been all kinds of c*ck ups in the past and although I cannot read it myself, neither can I use edfs web site either so I guess this is all part of their charm.

The other part is that they cannot take card payments using a human any more and since I need time to listen to card numbers the auto entry system times out before I can key it in. A design award for incompetence. Brian

If you do that then it stifles competition for the billing service which in effect is all the energy companies can change the charges for. After all, until we can efficiently store electricity you cannot purchase it in spot markets like you can with gas and oil as its here and gone. Brian

As a matter of interest, these statements, are they pictures of the bills or some form of text that one can cut and paste and edit? My previous experience is, much like bank statements they tend to scan paper but not OCR them and end up with a file that to a blind person is about as much use as a pin up of somebody famous. Brian

Or Tal Talk. Brian

Talk Talk sent me emails saying they couldn't send me emails. I asked them why by email - but only got an automated acknowledgement. By email. They then sent an email saying they were going to put me on paper billing (extra cost) because they couldn't contact me by email. I didn't actually need billing since I paid the same amount each month - and by DD.

After those bunch of idiots (and regular outages) BT are a breath of fresh air.

Correct, and I have no intention of so doing.

Correct again. My neighbour's experiences are enough to keep me away from them.

In article , Davey writes

Very wise.

All mine are electronically generated .pdf format files. Ctl-F "find" text works, I'd not expect that if it was an image.

nPower bills are a PoP compared to BT's. It all works out correct in the end but they seem to do it the hard way:

Service X £5.00 charged in advance for period A to C

Service X £6.00 amended charge for period A to C

Service X £4.00 refund of charges already paid for period A to B

My paper documents are scanned to searchable pdf which are images + ocr text. Win 10 indexes them so you can find them in the search bar.

Same here. Although not on Windows.