Prepayment for tariffs a token meter cannot express.
STS prepayment assumes a simple thing: a rate, a token, a credit balance. It has no way to represent time-of-use pricing, a maximum demand charge, a share of common-area consumption, or water and electricity on one balance. So commercial landlords who want prepayment are usually told it cannot be done.
It runs on the billing engine, not on a token.
MOL prepayment is the same billing engine that produces the credit invoices, run daily against a balance instead of monthly against an account. Which means it can price anything the billing engine can price.
Time of use, maximum demand, seasonal rates, network charges, a pro-rata share of common area, and electricity, water and gas on a single balance. Because it bills from half-hourly interval data, consumption is costed for the half hour in which it happened — not averaged across the month.
What happens as a balance runs down
Disconnection is the last step of a sequence that is designed to avoid it, and every stage is recorded.
01
Daily
Yesterday's readings are collected, costed against the tenant's tariff, and taken off the balance. Every metering point the tenant has, combined into one account.
02
Low balance
Below a set minimum, MOL sends an SMS and an email. Nothing has happened yet — this is the warning that avoids everything below it.
03
Below zero
The account moves to notified disconnect. Up to three further warnings go out, each stating the minimum amount payable to stop it.
04
No payment
MOL instructs the meter to disconnect through the head end, the account moves to disconnected, and the tenant is told that it has happened.
A tenant is never disconnected without warning, and the landlord can show exactly when each notice was sent and what the balance was. That record is the difference between a straightforward credit-control process and a dispute.
For whoever buys in bulk and sells on.
Office blocks, shopping centres and mixed-use developments where the owner takes a bulk supply from the utility and recovers it from tenants. Prepayment moves that recovery from thirty days after consumption to the day of it.
It works with the smart meters already installed. The meters are read by MOL's acquisition layer and processed by the same MDMS as everything else, so a tenant's prepaid balance and the landlord's utility invoice are derived from the same validated readings.
Want to see this on your own data?
We will run it against a month of your readings and show you what comes out.
Talk to us