[Mailman]

Originally Posted by Jasmin2000

@Mailman - I have a fixed sum DD of £80 pcm. If my account is in DR I just make a one-off payment. (you'd have to be nuts to let E.ON take what they want from your account) I'm not holding my breath on E.ON sorting out their acocunting mess - they clearly don't give a hoot; E.ON Next fined £5m for poor customer service standards.

Here's a freebee for the community. I'll send a legally correct personal invoice to them, which means thier accounting department has a written debit on the books and it must be dealt with. Done it before with Octopus and they paid quickly because accountant time is more expensive.

In the defence of Eon Next their handling of the variable direct debit billing process via Kraken has been flawless for me since I've moved to this method of DD settlement 18 months ago. I always receive advance notice of my direct debit on the statement I get on 2nd and another email reminder in about 10 days time. The DDD taken always zeroises my account balance without exception so I really do pay for what I use. I'm more than happy with this arrangement along with all the other like minded nutters out there who use VDD 😁

Good luck in resolving your issues.

[Jasmin2000]

@Mailman VDD is the best (I tried to get it myself but the E.ON assistant messed it up and then went AWOL) so I stayed with FDD, what I meant was the poor sods that end up with over £600 CR in their accounts thereby gifting E.ON the interest.

In any case VDD or FDD wouldn't have made a difference to the mess that E.ON have left in my account.

[JoeSoap]

@Jasmin2000

Having had a good think about all this mess, here’s my take on it…

1. You pay £80 a month fixed DD and then make manual payments if necessary to make up any shortfall when you receive a bill.

2. That should mean that your account should not build up much, if any, credit or debit balance.

3. You recently received (probably due to a mistake, glitch or a computing error) some duplicate bills covering April to September 23 inclusive. Presumably you had already paid these bills, perhaps apart from the most recent for September. You also received reversed charges covering the period January to September 23 inclusive.

4. This meant that you had charges for the duplicate bills rightly refunded. It also meant you had the charges for your January to March bills refunded even though you had not been billed twice for that period.

5. That over-payment of reverse charges (Jan - March) left you with an unexpected credit balance which you requested be refunded to you. This was agreed.

6. You were then billed again for Jan - Mar to make up for the reverse charge for that period that seemed unwarranted. This would have wiped out your unexpected credit balance. Now your refund request has been stopped as your account is back in debit.

7. Had the Jan - Mar duplicate bill come with the other duplicate bills and reverse charges then the overall effect of that statement would have been zero. It would have been a case of being billed for several months that you had already paid for and then being refunded it all back on the same statement.

8. The dates of the bill charges and the dates of the refunds may not exactly match so you currently have some debit balance that may be more than the original £4.35. You may perhaps have some balance to pay for recent usage.

9. My overall hunch is that you were mistakenly billed twice for most of this year’s consumption (perhaps apart from most recent consumption) but had all duplicate charges credited back to your account before any payments were made either way.

10. I think your account is probably currently back where it should be. I may be wrong of course. What do you think @LeeDQ_EONNext

[Mailman]

Originally Posted by Jasmin2000

@Mailman VDD is the best (I tried to get it myself but the E.ON assistant messed it up and then went AWOL) so I stayed with FDD, what I meant was the poor sods that end up with over £600 CR in their accounts thereby gifting E.ON the interest.

In any case VDD or FDD wouldn't have made a difference to the mess that E.ON have left in my account.

VDD is only available via a phone call to customer services as far as I am aware.

Agreed that your account billing has been a mess for reasons unknown to all. We await sitreps as they become available. 👍

[Mailman]

@JoeSoap

Good analysis about what might have happened although nobody is any the wiser as to the WHY? Above our paygrade methinks 😁

[JoeSoap]

Originally Posted by Mailman

@JoeSoap

Good analysis about what might have happened although nobody is any the wiser as to the WHY? Above our paygrade methinks 😁

It seems a simple case of duplicate billing which was hastily dealt with by using reverse charges. It was made not so simple by applying too many reverse charges and then having to issue another duplicate bill to cover the extra unwarranted reverse charges.

What a mess. A customer complaint might result in some compensation for causing unnecessary anxiety and use of time to work it all out.

[Mailman]

Originally Posted by JoeSoap

It seems a simple case of duplicate billing which was hastily dealt with by using reverse charges. It was made not so simple by applying too many reverse charges and then having to issue another duplicate bill to cover the extra unwarranted reverse charges.

What a mess. A customer complaint might result in some compensation for causing unnecessary anxiety and use of time to work it all out.

Agreed although still doesn't give anyone a clue as to the rationale applied by Eon Next bill generation for the duplicate billing that appears to have set it all off. 🤔

[meldrewreborn]

@Jasmin2000

By paying a fixed DD plus manual top ups you are acting in an unusual manner which the vast majority of customers don't adopt. while in normal circumstances its a valid way to manage your account, paying by variable DD as @Mailman suggests is perhaps a better way to proceed, but it does mean much higher bills in winter when heating increases our consumption. I have used fixed DD for many years and while the way some companies bill was intensely annoying (Symbio) in the main it has worked well. However i recognise its not for everyone, and its certainly true that energy supplier methods of managing fixed DD's tilts the balance away from the consumer and towards themselves, so that customers end up funding the capital of the company.

The DD guarantee does give instant reversal of incorrect direct debit, but has to be through a call to your own bank.

When reducing the problem to the absolute minimum all that needs to happen is to identify valid/correct bills and offset against that your payments - the rest is fluff and irrelevant to the actual situation, but indicative of the extent of the accounting errors.

[Lee_EONNext]

@JoeSoap Without seeing the account it would be really difficult to give a definitive answer here. Refunds are sometimes rejected on the basis of consumption gaps. I have no idea what reads have been entered or any consumption gaps or billed periods. The sporadic bill could be to issue the refund, if we don't have a read within 7 days our process is to obtain and update a bill.
@Jasmin2000 If we have taken money without your consent, not notified you, or taken an amount more than what was agreed you can contact the bank to have this returned. We can refund these obviously however these would take longer, however it would need to be clear that it has been taken in error.

Can I ask you to pop me your account details via a DM and I can have a look properly for you.

I always clear GDPR, liability sits with the person not the company, sometimes customers can respond after you have finished for the day, this could be
why you're being asked to clear GDPR over and over again.

If you have a complaint open you can ask to speak to that advisor who is looking after you and that advisor only, this saves the above and having to revisit certain information, however you will always be asked to clear GDPR.

Pop me a message and I will see what I can do for you.

[JoeSoap]

@LeeDQ_EONNext

It's not really all about the refund as far as I can see. That was requested when an unexpected credit balance appeared after some spurious billing and reverse charging. It disappeared after a further spurious bill. We may not know the full story but the whole thing looks a mess and I've had my stab at what happened several posts earlier. I may be completely wrong but I'd love to know what has really happened here.