In a previous blog post, I wrote about why, when moving to an AMI system, I feel it’s imperative to read and bill in individual gallons. Today, as I’m assisting a customer with making the switch, I thought it might be helpful to explain the steps involved.
Why read and bill in gallons?
As I wrote previously, if you plan to offer an online portal so your customers can access their daily or hourly usage, do you also want them to be able to reconcile their usage from the portal to their utility bill? If you do, then you will have to read and bill in gallons.
Of course, if you decide to make this change, you will want to communicate it to your customers, along with whatever promotions you are doing for your AMI system and customer portal. Be sure to include a flyer in printed bills and post it on your website for your ebilling customers.
So, what’s involved?
If you are already billing in gallons, but reading in larger units, such as hundreds or thousands of gallons, this means you are using a billing multiplier of 100 or 1000. In this case, all you need to do is change the multiplier to 1 and your usage will be calculated in gallons.
On the other hand, if you are currently reading and billing in hundreds or thousands, you will need to make some additional changes. The data fields listed below would need to be multiplied by your current billing units (100 or 1000) for each account in the system:
- Previous reading
- Current reading (if readings are already in the system)
- Usage (if usage has already been calculated)
- Any usage history used to calculate the moving average
- Moving average
You will also need to increase the Number of Dials accordingly – add 2 if moving from hundreds or 3 if moving from thousands.
Unless yours is a very small utility, you will most likely want to engage your billing software vendor to make these changes. You will likely incur a custom programming charge, but it sure beats changing every account manually! If your software vendor balks at making the changes, give me a call and I’ll be glad to be your advocate.
Lastly, don’t forget to adjust your rate tables accordingly. For example, if your current rate is $5.00/thousand gallons and you move to billing in gallons, you will need to modify your rate tables to be $.005/gallon. If you have tiered rates, you will also need to adjust your tiers accordingly – for every digit you moved the decimal place to the right for the rate, you will need to move the rate tier the same number of decimal places to the left.
Are you considering upgrading your meter reading system?
Are you considering moving to an automated meter reading system and wondering how to get started? To find out, please give me a call at 919-673-4050 or email me at gary@utilityinformationpipeline.com to learn how a business review could help you get started.
© 2024 Gary Sanders