JOHANNESBURG - City Power says it has recovered more than R1-billion as part of a drive to fix its finances.
But nearly 40 percent of that money comes from manual billing adjustments.
It includes fixing incorrectly programmed meters, illegal connections, unbilled accounts and technical errors.
The utility said correcting these problems has improved its billing accuracy.
Thamsanqa Mathiso, City Power’s chief commercial officer, said when they took over billing last July, the target was to recover R2,9-billion.
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“Forty percent of these manual adjustments come from incorrectly programmed meters, which is just slightly below R400-million. This under-billing took place due to other meter errors or illegal connections where a meter has been bypassed for multiple years in certain instances. When we fix the meter, we’re able to calculate what could’ve been the bill.”
The utility recovered about R61-million from unbilled accounts.
“Currently, what we have done is you literally have sight within City Power, from the meter itself to the installation, billing and invoices. You don’t guess at any stage what the consumption has been.”
Mathiso said parallel to the process of recovering revenue, City Power is also concerted in making sure that residents’ queries are dealt with speedily.
“When we took over in July, we had over 4,000 queries; we’ve reduced those queries significantly. It’s pointless for us to be able to raise revenue and our query basket remains very high.”