Why your Prepaid Sub-meter must be registered
Registering your Prepaid Submeter As a property owner you are familiar with the activities you needed to follow when you purchased your property. After the property is registered in your name a process was followed at the Municipality to ensure that the new owners’ details of the property were correctly linked to the Municipal account related to that property. The Municipality needs to ensure that the correct person or company, as the case may be, is being billed for the services being provided.
When you purchase a prepaid sub-meter you may be thinking: “but if it’s prepaid I don’t need an account”. However that is not the case. If you do not have a meter account then:
- How do you know which tenant is using which meter?
- How do you know how much money you are owed from the prepaid purchasesper meter?
- If you have more than one meter how do you know where each meter is located?
- If a meter is bypassed or not collecting money how do you know which one it is and where it is located?
By these questions you may have figured out that a meter account for a sub-meter is very important. You may have also figure out 3 important keys in any meter account.
The Important Keys:
- [Owner] Who owns the meter – to ensure the landlord gets paid correctly for all the meter purchases.
- [Location] Where is the meter located – for technical support, monitoring, and managing the meter on that location as well as the correct tariff for the location.
- [Meter] The meter number – for the management of the user such as adding changing replacing users as well as monitoring bypasses loading arrears, specific utility fixed charges and similar activities all these are connected to a meter number.
This is the Holy Trinity of Metering. Without any of those 3 pieces of information recorded correctly anything can go wrong. Funny enough for this specific reason our original system registration file was called “Trinity”. To ensure that the information above is loaded correctly, that your funds are safe and you can manage your meter users and tenants, we have a specific set of documentation that we use to achieve this:
- A fully complete and signed registration form
- A bank account verification letter
- Copy of the ID of the property owner
- A copy of the latest Municipal Bill
Now let’s explore why this documentation is required:
Full Completed and Signed Registration Form Enbaya does not have lengthy vending contracts for the base vending service.
You use our system for as long as you wish. But that said, there is a service level agreement, in simple words, “how things work” between the customer and Enbaya. The registration together with the website terms and conditions together form part of the service level agreement and ensures that Enbaya has the correct owners’ details for the meter account as well as defining the necessary authorities required like vending method and payment instructions.
A Bank Account Verification Letter:
These days fraud is everywhere and not only in Africa. Unfortunately to make sure that all our customer funds are protected we make absolutely sure we are paying the right bank accounts. It takes us time and effort to process all this but we do it to protect your money. One of the services provided on the Outsource vending method is monies collected from your end users vending (less service fees) is paid into the nominated account at month end. There would be severe repercussions if the monies were paid into the incorrect account, so to err on the side of caution, this quality assurance must be done. ID of the Property Owner There is no point of having a banking confirmation letter without an owner, so to further support the quality assurance process, the ID is requested of the property owner.
The property owner, in terms of the ongoing management of the meter accounts, has the overall authority to issue instructions to Enbaya to make changes, whether these are additions, deletions, account changes etc. To prevent the risk of malicious intent of end users, Enbaya asks for the ID of the property owner so that when an instruction is received, Enbaya can cross check the details against the registration form as well as verify that the instruction is from the authorised person.
A copy of the latest Municipal account:
If we protect you as our customer, we also need to make sure we protect your meter user, which in turn is your customer. We do this by ensuring that the meter user pays the correct tariffs on his prepaid meters. For this reason a copy of the latest municipal account serves to validate two requirements; the first is to verify that the details captured on the registration form are in fact the correct property owners details and the second is to provide the relevant tariff structure that must be applied to the meter account. An error in the tariff type could have serious financial repercussions for the property owner if the end users are paying the incorrect amount for their tokens.
In summary if you install a prepaid meter for risk management and protection to ensure you receive all your utility funds, then why risk not getting all your funds or have them paid into someone else’s account?
We are fully aware that the requirements above can appear to be onerous and time consuming, these are merely in the short term. In the long term, it is Enbaya’s commitment to minimise the financial risk customers are exposed to in the prepaid industry by ensuring that the quality and integrity of the services it provides are always adhered and maintained.