Larger water meters – generally two-inch and larger – often have a different registration than residential meters. These meters use a billing multiplier to convert the registered usage to gallons.
If this multiplier is incorrectly entered in the billing system, it can lead to billing errors, either in your or the customer’s favor.
What is the effect?
If the meter multiplier is 10, but is entered in your billing system as 1, you will underbill your customer by a factor of 10. For example, a usage of 10,000 gallons will only be billed as 1,000 gallons. When you find the error, you must decide whether to back-bill the customer or forgo the lost revenue. Neither of which is a positive outcome for your utility.
Conversely, if the multiplier is overstated in the billing system, you will overbill your customer. For example, if this meter with a multiplier of 10 is entered in your billing system as 100, the same 10,000 gallons will be billed as 100,000 gallons! In this case, you will end up giving your customer a sizeable refund once the error is detected.
How do we keep this from happening?
The best way to ensure this doesn’t happen is to conduct a physical inventory of each meter in your system that is two inches or larger. Hopefully, your billing system has a report by meter size to provide the information you need to identify these meters. Once you have a list of meters, have your field service staff visit each meter to confirm the size and multiplier for each meter.
I recommend performing this inventory on an annual basis. If you have too many large meters to inventory all of them in the same month, you can divide the list and conduct the inventory over several months.
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© 2025 Gary Sanders