Payments
What is the payment feature on the smart biogas app?
This feature allows you to design payment plans based on your project business model. These can include time-based payment plans or per-usage type plans, and they are easily assigned to your customers.
The payment platform allows you to record customers’ payments, keeping financial records. We are working on integrating mobile money into the system to allow automatic reconciliation of incoming payments to specific customers.
If you don’t have this feature and would like to use it, please contact a member of the Inclusive Energy team.
How to create payment plans
Payment plan types
When registering a new customer or editing a customer’s payment plan, there are two options as radio buttons:
Rent to Own
Energy as a Service
Rent-to-own
If “Rent to Own” is selected, the customer will be aiming to pay off the cost of their digester or biogas system over time. Once the total digester cost has been paid off, the customer will now own their system and no longer be required to pay for it. In this case, it will be mandatory to enter a ‘Total Digester Cost’ when assigning a customer to a Rent-to-own plan.
Energy-as-a-service
If ‘Energy as a Service’ is selected, the customer will continuously pay for their energy supply without ever owning the system outright.
Tariff types
Time-based tariffs (e.g. EMI)
A fixed amount is collected from customer’s credits on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.
Usage-based tariffs
Assigning a customer to a payment plan
You can either assign a customer to a payment plan during the initial registration phase, or you can go to the customer’s page and click on the ‘Payments’ tab.
When assigning a customer to a payment plan you will have the option to enter a ‘down payment’ and a ‘total digester cost’. A downpayment is a deposit made by the customer for the initial installation but the figure does not apply to the customer’s credit, it can be left as 0 if needed. The total digester cost will only be an option when choosing a ‘rent to own’ plan. It is the target amount the customer must pay before owning their system.
Adding and removing credits
FAQ
What happens if a customer is switched between plan types?
‘Rent to own’ to ‘Energy as a service’:
There will no longer be a ‘total digester cost’ so payments will be ongoing. Any existing credits and the credit history will remain.
‘Energy as a service’ to ‘Rent to own’:
You will start paying towards the digester cost and all the payments made in the past would be contributed towards the digester cost. Any existing credits and credit history will remain.
2. When does a payment plan start?
As soon as enough credits have been added to the customer’s account, to cover the first payment, the system will take the first payment and the plan will begin.
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