Apparently it’s on the back system and can’t be posted or emailed til it’s on the front system .
This will take 6 weeks!
Are they talking genuine computer speak or just fobbing me off?
We’ve not had a bill since last August.

change supplier.

The current lot will send you a final bill within a week 🙂

I call BS.

But then I call all utility suppliers BS.

Smells like Scottish Power.

Rockplough – Member
Smells like Scottish Power.

POSTED 35 SECONDS AGO # REPORT-POST
Correct!
We need a bill so we can do our accounts for the shop.
What should my plan of attack be?

Could be nPower as well. Run.For.the.hills.

Or EDF – all as bad.
At least with NPower you can shaft them after the Watchdog’s decision

wwaswas – Member
change supplier.

The current lot will send you a final bill within a week

No they won’t. I left First Utility on the 15th July and still haven’t had my final bill. I rang up yesterday and asked about it to be told it takes 6-8 weeks.

I can’t work out why it takes longer than their normal billing cycle as they have the final meter readings!

Sadly in our case an extended period of brute force was required. We bombarded them with emails, telephone calls, and tweets. The twitter angle seemed to open a second complaint file which may have helped. It took us months.

If you haven’t been billed for a year you may try mentioning the ’back-billing rule’ whereby a supplier can only backdate for 1 year if they have not supplied a bill. If for example they don’t bill you until October, then you wouldn’t be liable for August/September 2014. That might light a fire under them.

I would advise you to log every single interaction you have with them. Dates. times, names, and what they committed to. They are probably the most crushingly inept, incompetent, and broken organisation I’ve ever dealt with. Wouldn’t touch them with a bargepole ever again.

Could be a genuine IT reason if the IT infrastructure is a mix of different companies infrastructure that got acquired by Scottish Power. It’s one thing doing a basic join up of infrastructure but it’s another getting legacy billing systems to interface with new systems etc. Still shouldn’t take 6-8 weeks to transfer data unless they’ve got a lot of manual process involved in it.

Not saying it’s acceptable service but one of the client’s I work on has a nightmare of legacy infrastructure that can’t be migrated for various reasons and I sympathise with anyone that works in such an environment…

We’ve had no end of ball-ache with SP, basically started with the renovation of the wife’s old upper-cottage flat which still had white meter heating & the relevant associated meters installed – we ripped everything out & started from scratch including having SP themselves replace the old meters with the correct new one but for some bizarre reason they couldn’t update the system to generate a correct bill & for over a year we were being charged for all our electricity on the “peak rate” associated with the old white meter heating meter…

In the middle of all this we tried changing supplier but couldn’t as SP couldn’t generate a final bill because they couldn’t update the “actual” billing information with the correct meter readings 😡

Eventually it all culminated in several complaints to the ombudsman resulting in a full refund of all our electricity charges for over a year (because they were still unable to calculate the correct bill) and no further electricity charges until they can correct the system error (we’re currently still receiving free electricity because they still can’t fix the problem)

Don’t hang around – get onto he ombudsman & say it’s impacting severely on your business – SP apparently have serious problems with their system which have been ongoing for some time – long may it continue as it’s saving us a fortune. 8)

J

*edit – when you phone the ombudsman, there’s a few button-press options available – one of which you press one button for SP & another for every other supplier combined…

British Gas are unable to send me a final bill for a place we moved out of in January. They’ve chased me, I’ve said send me a bill so I can check it and pay it, they say we’ve sent it to you (we check the new address together) they say we’ll definitely send it to you.

They don’t. Repeat for months. Now they’ve passed on my details to a debt collection agency. DC agency called me, I explained what was happening, they sent me a copy bill the next day.

We need a bill so we can do our accounts for the shop.
What should my plan of attack be?

Put an estimate in, can’t imagine it’s ‘material’.

Could be a genuine IT reason if the IT infrastructure is a mix of different companies infrastructure that got acquired by Scottish Power. It’s one thing doing a basic join up of infrastructure but it’s another getting legacy billing systems to interface with new systems etc. Still shouldn’t take 6-8 weeks to transfer data unless they’ve got a lot of manual process involved in it.

Not saying it’s acceptable service but one of the client’s I work on has a nightmare of legacy infrastructure that can’t be migrated for various reasons and I sympathise with anyone that works in such an environment…

They’ve been trying to put SAP in for a couple of years now…

We’ve been paying £1 per month for over 12 months now. They auto changed the DD and just sent a letter telling us! I’m not complaining, but do accept that at some point we’ll be properly charged.

Thanks for the heads up on them not charging for anything not billed for a year.
Nice £735 rebate.
STW I salute you.

SP have been way the worst utility we’ve used.
Have now switched to OVO (thanks steve!)

SP put us on a different tariff than we signed up to for no apparent reason other than they’re rubbish, and for my mum failed to log the initial readings, causing real hassle.

SOS (shower of s****)

Sounds like British Gas!
They did not bill me, I chased them up with no joy. They then sent a company for the money. I had no warning letters or a bill. Finally sorted it by quoting when and who I had spoken to about it from the beginning.
The tinkers!!

Now with Ebico.

To be fair Scottish Power have screwed up but once I got the lady who was responsible for screw ups their service has been excellent.
Also got 1.6p reduction on our Kwh. Should save over £200 a year.
Still not had any bills though!

Genuinely delighted to be of service. Who do I invoice for my 10%? 😉

Left Npower and SP this year as they are both a steaming pile of shite.

Npower screwed our bills about so much and failed to take payment so many times that it was an utter nightmare.

I setup 8 DD with them, each one they cancelled for no reason and them proceeded to send warning letters for late payment.

With OVO when Npower finally decide to switch us, the ****.

When we left Scottish Power took them 13 weeks to refund my £200 credit, bunch of time wasting c#*%@ 👿