Hey @louise74,

I’m sorry for the issues you’ve been having.

When you pay by bank transfer are you using the following details: 

If you haven’t added the OVO account number and your postcode as reference, they won’t know what account to assign your payment to. Don’t worry though, if you contact our Support Team they will ask you for some further details so they can locate the payments you’ve made. 

If you are on the simpler variable on demand plan you can pay on receipt of your bill. It might be helpful for you to request paper statements? That way you can see exactly what you owe on each statement without viewing the ‘live billing’ on the online account as I think this might be causing confusion.

We have a really great guide that breaks down how our billing works including example statements, please click here to find out more. 

Hope this helps.

So an update on my missing £140.

Contacted my bank and they said they would be able to claim the money back.

Letter from bank arrived this morning stating that my bank had tried to reclaim my money but this was now impossible as the OVO account has been closed, so basically OVO have stolen £140 of my money.

There has been no  attempt from OVO the contact me regarding the issue, nothing at all

At a time when energy prices are soaring and the cost of living increasing I find this absolutely sickening to be treated like this.

DISGUSTING COMPANY!!

Hi @Whytey,

I’m sorry for the issues you’ve had.

I’d advise contacting Support who will be best placed to deal with this. 

If the money was transferred to:

Our team will be able to find this, it will have gone into a pool of un-assigned payments but as you’ve sent in bank statements they should be able to find it using the last few digits of your bank account number, the amount and payment date. 

When you speak to an advisor advise them they need to raise a ‘Payment allocation’ case. This will then be picked up by the right team. 

Hope this helps. 

I made a payment £80 over the phone to Ovo on 28th sept, and was told it didnt go through, attempted another twice ,still no luck apparently, but on checking my online banking later that day it appears that all 3 payments have been taken out of my bank account amounting to £240, but ovo will not credit my ovo account until they "find it" . Even though I have submitted proof from the bank that this is the case , and now my ovo account credit is reducing rapidly and I can not afford to pay more in , the govt payment helps but only slightly . Anyone else had this prob.

Hey @Dinky,

Sorry for the issues you’ve had.

Did you pay by bank transfer? If so, and you didn’t put the OVO account number and your postcode as reference it will need to be manually located by our team. Rest assured, once the payments have been found, they will be added to your account and the payments made it error will be refunded. 

Not paid by transfer it was paid over the phone to a real person all my details were given when she answered the phone but has now been 4 wks , you have the proof straight from my bank ,and my credit is getting lowerI also want the whole £240 to go into my credit now.

Hey @Dinky,

Thank you for confirming those details. That is unusual that’s it’s showing in your bank but not on OVO’s side. I’d advise contacting Support again to see if the payments have cleared on our side, this should have been sorted by now if you’ve sent across a bank statement. 

I have been contacting them nearly every week and each time they are looking into it !! Lets wait and see .

Shocking company.

I pay by standing order. £115 Payment at the start of August credited to my account ok.

Payments at the start of September, October and November all "lost" - same bank details, amount and reference and I've had collections emailing me telling me my account is overdue.

That's £345 of payments LOST.

I've emailed customer service and complaints with a copy of my bank statement showing the payments and twice since re sent it in replies to them when they replied to me asking to prove the payments  with a bank statement (have they even read my previous emails?!)

Not even had my complaint acknowledged even though I have specifically emailed the complaints team.

@kay_p I understood OVO don’t accept Standing Orders as a means of payment, but yours worked in August? That’s interesting, though obviously bad that further payments haven’t been allocated to your account. How long have you been paying by standing order ?

Hiya, since August. I found their details somewhere as a means of paying and what ref to use, when I set it up I called them and told them and the customer service operative said they'd note it on my account, didn't say they wouldn't accept it. The first payment went through no problem so cannot understand how they have lost three others unless their admin is just shockingly bad. 

What do you think @Blastoise186 ? 

Hmm… Ultimately I think the Collections Team are best placed to try and fix this. They have the power to locate lost/missing payments and try to link them back up to your account if memory serves.

If doing so means that any outstanding debts/debits are cleared out completely, they can then arrange to recall and shut down any ongoing debt collection activities.

But you REALLY shouldn’t rely on Standing Orders for this exact reason. I’ve said it until I was blue in the face that OVO does not support Standing Orders and that if you disregard my warning and use them anyway, it’s at your own risk - and it’s technically your fault if the money doesn’t reach your OVO account as a result of using unsupported payment methods.

The only ways to guarantee that payment correctly reaches your account are:

• Direct Debit
• Credit/Debit Card (VISA and Mastercard usually work best, AMEX is not recommended)
• Google Pay
• Apple Pay
• Giro Bank Slip
• Cheque
• Manual Bank Transfer via Faster Payments - please don’t use CHAPS though!

Use of any other payment method not listed above is either unsupported or prone to failure. For the avoidance of doubt, Standing Orders are officially Unsupported for OVO’s purposes. Use of an unsupported payment method is entirely at your own risk.

For anyone who thinks Standing Orders are treated the same as Faster Payments by the banks, I can tell you they are not. Faster Payments shows up as an instant transfer on a bank statement, usually with the code FPI for incoming or FPO for outgoing. Standing Orders show up as, well, Standing Orders with the code SO. OVO can tell the difference between the two, as can just about everyone else. Remember, they’re not treated the same despite common misconceptions!

Also this is a real illustration of why direct debits are cheaper to process and hence are at a cheaper tariff.

Yeah, DD is totally automated apart from a tiny bit of human involvement to set it up. After that it’s just chuck enough cash in the bank each month and leave it there.

Card Payments are also mostly automated and fairly quick too, since that can just be hooked up to a payment provider and then take action based on whatever response comes back. If it worked, credit the account, if it failed, do nothing. Same applies to Apple Pay and Google Pay too, just ever so slightly different ways to get there!

Giro Bank Slips, Cheques and Faster Payments (aka manual bank transfer) require human involvement to process, but provided the customer does them correctly, they’re fairly reliable - just REALLY slow compared to the automated options!

Hmm ok, so I'm new to this forum and have not seen warnings about standing orders. I pretty much pay my other bills the same way with no issue. Why is it Ovo does not support them? Genuine question.

I don't really understand why they didn't say something to that effect when I called them and told them I was setting up a standing order. Surely if they didn't support it then their operative should have said? 

Maybe naivety on my part, but they've had the money and my bank can verify it. 

We have mentioned it to quite a lot of visitors. Here’s a previous answer by @M.isterW .

OVO isn’t alone either. No energy supplier has ever been known to officially support Standing Orders.

I maintain my stance. Proof of sending is not proof of delivery. Proof of delivery is not proof of receipt. If you want automated regular payments to reliably show up every month, you must use Direct Debits, NOT Standing Orders.

Ok well I've learnt something I didn't know today.

How does it process differently their end? Again, genuine question and trying to understand 

Because if you’re just filtering transactions for Faster Payments Incoming (FPI) for example to get rid of noise from everything else, you may miss other incoming payments from different mechanisms despite only supporting FPI and DD.

And besides that, paying by Standing Order means you’d be on OVO’s Simpler Energy On-Demand tariff, so there’s absolutely no guarantee your SO would ever pay off every single bill in full and stop the Collections Team from chasing you unless you set it to be massively higher than your highest possible bill - and then you’d have to delete and recreate it at least once every three months to account for the next price cap period.

There's a simple difference - with a standing order you (well, your bank) are sending money. With a direct debit the receiving company (in this case, OVO) are taking the money from your account.

Why does that matter? Imagine you're a company with thousands of customers. If each of them is individually sending you money each month it lands in the company bank account and is a massive task to match that up to the correct accounts. Some people will use the correct references but others won't. Some will send it on the wrong day. Some will send the wrong amounts. It's an admin headache.

With direct debits OVO simply sends a data file with all the information to BACS. It's fully automated and the only payments the company has to check are failed ones, which is done automatically.

But you're worried about OVO being able to take money from your account? There is a set of rules a company must adhere to if they use direct debits. They have to tell you how much they're taking and when they're taking it. You also have a right to claim the money back if you believe it has been taken incorrectly. If a company doesn't stick to these rules they could lose the ability to use direct debits and that would be a disaster for a company.

Ok thanks for the insight. 

I have just received a spam email to my spam box which states its come from OVO. It basically says my account is in debt by over £300 I know this not to be true because I paid a Bill last week for January and when logging in to my true account the Balance is cleared. I am just wondering where I can forward this email to as I don’t want anyone falling for this scam. Its scary because they have got my OVO account number in the email. 

Report to report@phishing.gov.uk

Ok thank you for that. 

I’d also recommend calling 0800 069 9831 to check the status. If you have definitely paid the debt off and/or you are currently NOT in debt to OVO, the Collections Team can sort things out for you.