How to ‘Check your Account Balance’
- 1. Enter your Bill amounts.
- 2. Enter your Payment amounts.
- 3. Click ‘Reconcile’ to see the interim balance.
- 4. Obtain Your ‘Actual Read’ meter data, and run it through the ‘PowerBill™’ app to get the real price of your bill. (Repeat this step for each Bill).
- 5. Repeat Step 1 – to see the real balance of your account.
Questions
- Q. Why do you need to do this?
- A. You may have Overpaid and are not aware of it.
- Q. My account balance needs adjusting, What Do I Do?
- A. Get Your PowerBill Report and request your provider corrects your account.
- Useful Resources
- Electricity Bill Help – Australia
- Energy Consumers Australia
- Australian Energy Regulator – AER
- Australian Energy Market Commission – AEMC
Things You Need to Know
You can obtain your metered usage data – dating back 2 years (from Distributor or Provider). You cannot be denied it. This is protected by law (and so enables Bill corrections). (Read More)
National Energy Retail Amendment Rule 2014 No. 2
Concerned with customer access to information about their energy consumption, and in part says:
(2) Historical billing data provided to the small customer for the previous 2 years must be provided without charge, but may be provided subject to a reasonable charge where the data requested is for an earlier period or has been requested more than:
(a) four times in any 12 month period, in the case of the supply of electricity; or
(b) once in any 12 month period, in the case of the supply of gas.
*From Smart Meters (Type 4 and 5) that produce the nem12 & nem13 file format specification (which is a csv file of 51 Columns).
*This data holds importance for many reasons, chiefly as it is a “Gold standard” and core ingredient to calculating the correct bill charges.
Meaning you have the rights to that data now.
Due to its importance to consumer rights and obligations, enforcing consumer Real-Time Access to meter data is currently under consideration by the Regulator (AER).
Access to Real Time Data
https://www.aemc.gov.au/rule-changes/real-time-data-consumers
Vitally important to accurate billing, is the ‘actual’ meter read data, where the meter reads are performed on a quarterly basis and the data provided by some retailers as a downloadable csv file through their customer portals.
Billing
Estimate bill cycles (Estimate-Estimate-Actual) – where ‘actualisation events’ should occur on every 3rd month and the account is evened out/balanced to zero, so any over-payments or under-payments are redressed and the consumer only pays for what they have used. (‘Actual’ usage equals actual payments made).
Actual bill cycles – where ‘actualisation events’ should occur as a matter of fact every 2 or 3 months, (whenever the actual read is done).
*Consumers are advised to check their bill accurately records their breakdown of usage no matter the billing cycle, so the charges applied are accurate (particularly those on Time-of-Use plans which can be notably troublesome).
