More about prepaid utilities
This page contains extra information regarding municipalities, service providers, and other aspects of the Prepaid Utilities service.
The information on this page pertains mostly to prepaid electricity.
Service Providers
The consumer-facing channel needs to reconcile transactions and settle funds with the service provider. Because of this, the service provider is referred to as a 'settlement entity'. The Electrum Prepaid Utilities Service Interface messaging defines a settlementEntity field that can be used to transmit information about the service provider.
Coverage
- Each service provider covers a certain network of municipalities. The originating system should consider more than one service provider in order to service a wider consumer base.
- The network of municipalities covered by a service provider may change monthly based on whether tenders are renewed, lost, or won after the previous tender period has ended. Our routing strategy, broadcasting (described on the Overview page), is designed to account for changes in municipal contracts.
Operations
All service providers support the basic operations of meter lookups and token purchases. Some providers support additional operations such as trial purchases and others. These are listed on the Overview page.
Municipalities
Each service provider interfaces with various municipalities, who ultimately receive and process requests, and issue redeemable tokens. Municipalities are therefore referred to as 'receivers'. It is important to note that he receiver can either be a municipality or a utility. The Electrum Prepaid Utilities Service Interface messaging defines a receiver field that can be used to transmit information about the municipality.
Electricity rates
Municipalities charge consumers – depending on how much electricity has been purchased for a specific meter number for the month – in tariff blocks. Up until a certain level of electricity usage per month the lowest rates will apply. Any electricity purchases beyond this point will fall into a higher-rate tariff block.
If a consumer's transaction fails after it has been successfully processed by the municipality (meaning that the consumer does not receive their units) the municipality will still consider the electricity purchase to have been successful. When the consumer then attempts another transaction they may find that they now fall into a higher pay band, and fewer units will be received for the same amount of money.
Meter numbers
Meter compliance differs across municipalities. Therefore the meter number length may vary and may not be to the STS (Standard Transfer Specification) standard.
This is a global standard used for the prepayment of utilities like electricity. It describes the secure messaging protocol between a payment interface and a prepaid meter.
Information Returned
Different municipalities return different information to the service provider when processing prepaid utilities transactions. Therefore, neither Electrum nor the service provider can guarantee that certain information will be populated into the response message sent back to the originating system. This applies to the following types of information.
- Consumer personal details (name, address)
- Meter data other than the meter number
- Which token represents free units, if applicable (see section on free units below)
- Monetary value or number of units associated with the token
- Token types present in the response message. Service providers cannot always differentiate between key change, standard, and basic support tariff tokens. The originating system should therefore always keep the same order of the tokens when displaying the tokens to the consumer.
Prepaid Utility Purchases will most often return the name and ID of the utility that serviced the request in the receiver and receiver.Id fields respectively. As the service providers use different names and ID's than Electrum, we will map the service provider's information to our own. A list of Electrum's utilities and their associated ID's can be found at the bottom of this document.
Free Electricity Units
Some low-usage households qualify for a certain number of free electricity units per month. For this reason, service providers allow a zero amount to be requested. If the consumer is due free units, the appropriate token will be returned in the response message.
The originating system should thus also allow for zero-value transactions.
If the consumer's first prepaid electricity transaction for the month is for a non-zero amount, then tokens for both the free units and the units from the purchased amount will be returned at the same time (usually, but not always, as separate tokens).
Once the free units for the month have been used up, the consumer must purchase additional units at their own expense. They can receive the next allotment of free units from the start of the next month. The units are only valid for that specific month, and fall away if not used during the month.
Reversal Advice Messaging
Service providers sometimes allow reversal advice message processing, but this does not serve the same function as a reversal for another dual message service. Reversal messaging for the prepaid utility service providers is just a means for the originating system to track loss.
Municipalities do not process reversal advice messaging. This means that the originating system should accept liability for any financial loss if a transaction has failed and is unable to be retrieved using the transaction retry functionality that attempts to retrieve any issued tokens.
Other
Smart Meters Ekurhuleni
Smart Meters Ekurhuleni do not send back a token number to be manually input into the meter. Rather, the response message states 'Meter updated', and the meter is automatically topped up with the tendered amount.
Eskom and VAT
An Eskom electricity receipt does not indicate separate figures for the taxable amount (rand value) and the added VAT. It simply shows the total amount that the consumer has purchased at 0% VAT. However, the message to the service provider and the receipt given to the consumer indicate that the total amount includes 15% VAT.