By Nancy Gardner


Utilities are services consumed by the public and are provided by a public service. Organizations that maintain the infrastructure for the aim of providing a public service are referred to as public functions. These services include water, sewage, natural gas and electricity. Utility billing systems can really reduce labor cost as this system is automated and does not require a lot of manpower.

The existence of a way to automate billing to their clients has saved the utilities costs on having to employ more personnel to read meters which are located in remote and dangerous areas. It has minimized the risk exposure of the company to injuries of its employees and liabilities caused to customers.

Manual meter reading has been used for a long time in most countries. However, there are cases especially in the rural areas where it may be very difficult to access the meter in order to read. This makes manual meter reading time consuming.

Automatic meter reading, on the other hand, can be done remotely without necessarily going to the customer meter. Automatic meter readers are generally regarded to as any system that makes it possible to read the meters at a distance of one hundred meters or more.

As part of installing an automated reading system the utility will have to put together an accurate database of their meters and customers. Most of these utilities report many unregistered service connections or missing accounts from the old database. Therefore, illegal connections are removed or registered appropriately into the system to generate new revenue.

Effective billing system also has the function of creating invoices. It has the option of batch invoicing which allows a number of invoices to be printed or emailed at a time. This saves time because each email does not have to be sent individually. This type of system allows the utility to set up different pricing systems for the different customers it serves. The system will bill the user based on their subscriptions. In overall, this system is designed to quicken and make the process of creating invoices as painless as possible.

The accounts receivables should be considered before designing a functional billing software. Utilities which bill their customers quarterly a year or once in two months has increased accounts receivables and larger customer bills. It gets worse if the bills are disputed by the customers perhaps because of inaccurate readings making the whole process lengthy. Energy and water rates are continually on the rise and it is advisable for such service providers to provide bills in a timely manner and consistently. This is only possible by the use of an automatic gauge reading system suited for the utility.

There may be a utility invoicing software which will give your customers an option to pay online which is a huge advantage. The customers will have to register on an online portal where they will have to log in with the necessary information and allow them to pay their bills online.

The utility will have to analyze the customers reason for calling from the call logs in the call centers. Automated meter readings have reduced the customer calls and led to an increase in customer satisfaction.




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