Top Utility Management Features
The brains, transparency and accuracy behind prepaid meters
Part of our Enbaya Cloud Services is Aurora. Our prepayment platform for Power, Water & Gas utilities that is meter manufacturer independent, allowing the utility to provide prepayment service to consumers using any combination of STS & AMI Meters with integrated disconnect functionality.
Metering Technology
Most Prepayment systems lock a utility into a single meter vendor, Aurora is an open system supporting a variety of metering technologies. Capable of supporting any AMI vendor that offers meters with an integrated remote disconnect capability.
- Provides an API to interface with their head-in system.
- Supports specialisation prepayment meters using numeric-key (IEC 62055-51) manufactured by STS compliant vendors.
- Capable of supporting multiple meter technologies on the same installation
- Provides a migration pathway to newer meter technologies as well as allowing piloting of products from multiple meter vendors simultaneously
Financial management & accounting
Rather than only providing summary information at the end of a period, Aurora generates a journal entry for each transaction that follows double-entry standards and enforces that each transaction creates a balanced entry to ensure that each transaction type follows the utility accounting policies.
- Users with appropriate access can view the accounting entry for each transaction,
- Aurora posts journal entries at a utility specific level of detail to the utility financial system.
- Also provided in a human readable format allowing the ability to drill down to the transactional level for any entry.
FLEXIBLE REPORTING
Aurora has an integrated report engine and a large library of standard reports. Using flatter table structure to allow for simpler queries to generate reports which dramatically reduces complexity for creating custom reports
- Viewed in a through the browser interface or exported in CSV, XLS or PDF formats.
- Reports have sub-totaling options, filters, and other features to allow for adhoc customisation.
Customer Account Management
Aurora’s customer account interfaces integrate customer, location and meter specific information in a single display that allows the user to quickly view key information about the account. Tabs within pages provide detailed information for specific areas. Function buttons allow the system user to quickly access vending or administrative functions
Tariff Administration Rate
Aurora is designed to handle complex tariff structures with multiple components. Initial tariff rate structures are configured during the implementation phase. The system manages changes over time through an intuitive web interface
- Time of Use Rates where AMI meters are in use for prepayment.
- IBT – Inclining Block Tariffs
- Fixed Charges & Other monthly fee collections.
Wallet
Each customer account within Aurora has a wallet account. Funds in the wallet are held for future purchases or payment charges. When a customer makes a payment, funds are first used to pay outstanding arrears, should they exist. The balance, net of any fees due, is applied to the Aurora Wallet.
- Entire balance converted to a utility token for consumption
- Generate a token for a portion of the available wallet balance
- SMS tokens
- Transfer wallet fund to another customer as a loan or sale
- Autotility enabling recurring tokens every month
Delegates & role based
Sometimes the need arises where the organisation needs to ask staff members or representatives to perform tasks on behalf. A common example of this is allowing your accountant or bookkeeper to have online access to your bank account so that statements can be viewed and downloaded.
- Enables multiple people to access, view and collaborate.
- Enabling people to perform tasks without having to wait for information or authorisation
- User and Role based customised access and limitations
- Effective, Productive and Reduced work load and Risk
- Changes recorded in Life Records
Life records
Aurora stores all documents & non-transactional events as Life records.
- Receipts, statements, tokens & shift-reports
- Administrative activity such as meter change-outs, customer moves, etc.
- Upload documents such as customer contracts or images such as photographic evidence of tampers and associate them with a customer, location and/or meter.
- The Life system provides a history of key elements within Aurora augmenting the financial record and is used pervasively throughout the system.
Arrears Collection
One of the primary purposes of a prepaid program is to allow the utility to continue services to financially challenged customers. Since post-paid customers that migrate to prepayment typically will have an outstanding balance, it’s unnecessary to allow the customers to pay-off balances over time. Aurora addresses this need by allowing the utility to collect the past balances by taking a portion of each future purchase until the debt is paid.