Electricity resellers have difficulties issuing receipts to their customers. These companies can only get paid based on the invoices they get from the distributors and some of the latest regulatory changes can mean significant delays. “We believe that this billing delay is going to aggravate the electricity price situation, there will be many consumers who, in addition to raising the price of electricity, will accumulate bills to pay,” says Javier Bescós, president of the Association of Independent Marketers. of Energy.
The president of Acie explains that “In June, when the rates changed, there were many billing errors that can be justified by the great change made in the electricity bill. However, two months later we continue to suffer unjustifiable delays in the billing of the distributors “.
According to Bescós, “we found these delays above all in Endesa and Unión Fenosa (Naturgy), where we have gone from an average invoicing delay of less than 1% in May to a delay of close to 7% and 16% respectively. The retailer is the company that faces the client and these delays are causing a lot of anger in our clients and a loss of image in front of them”.
For this type of company, this situation generates serious operational problems. “Operationally, it is causing us a loss of working capital by having to buy energy without billing it in up to 16% of our customers and a lot of workload attending to the thousands of consumer claims, opening claims at the distributor and keeping track of all of them “. And he also adds that “what worries us the most is that, in the case of some distributors, we do not have an approximate resolution date, they simply tell us that they have system failures and they apologize.”
Naturgy, consulted by this newspaper, indicated that the delays were “specific.” In fact, sources consulted indicate that only 0.2% of their clients have delays of more than three months, for the rest it would be a single invoice.
The marketers also feel affected by the situation that is being experienced in the market this year. “Among other things, we have had to adapt all our systems, explain the change in rates to customers and advise them how to adapt, put up with errors or delays throughout the market chain, put up with 21% VAT on tolls and transportation charges. our clients, compared to the 10% that we transferred to them, endure the rise in energy prices in clients with whom we had agreed a fixed annual price or endure the estimated readings of certain distributors since the confinement”, indicates Bescós.
Acie applauds the Government’s decision to lower VAT and assures that it was a request that it made to help its clients without benefiting the companies, however, “the way of carrying it out has been a great detriment to the marketers. All consumers have a contract with their distributor and the distributors act on their behalf to integrate the tolls into our electricity bill and pay what was agreed in the contract between the customer and the distributor to the distributor.In fact, there are large customers who decide to pay the tolls directly to the distributor and the energy to the retailer. What we did not expect is that we would have to charge 10% VAT to customers and pay 21% VAT to distributors. This increases the cash stress that we already had for the rise in prices because it is an amount that will be regularized by the end of the year at the earliest. And to put it in context, in the case of many marketers, the amount of this VAT imbalance may be similar to their annual profits.”
The problems of adaptation also did not stop there. The speed with which the measure was adopted created a lot of uncertainty.
“Only 24 hours were given to start billing at 10% and the terms of the bill to which this reduction would have to be applied were not defined (only energy, energy and tolls, meter rental, down payment rights, etc.) This caused the stoppage of thousands of invoices until the tax departments made the appropriate consultations and they were answered, and until the systems could be adapted to invoice all the correct concepts at 10% in an adequate manner”.
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