Payments

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

If you have payment plans activated for your organisation, you will be able to go to ‘My Organisation’ and select ‘Payment Plans’. You will see a list of your existing plans and the number of customers that are currently associated with that plan. You can also create new payment plan from here.

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

You can assign the cost per m3 that a customer will pay for the biogas used.

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

At present the payment platform requires manual entry to record incoming payments, but we are working on integrations with various payment providers to automate this process via the SB Home end-user application. If you have a specific integration request get in touch with us to discuss your needs.

  

 FAQ

  1. What happens if a customer is switched between plan types?


  1. ‘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.


  1. ‘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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