What is the best day to give readings to avoid estimates being used on bills?

OVO uses live billing. I suspect your actual reading got used to calculate everything up until the point of the actual reading. If you missed the window, the next bill will factor it in.

You might want to consider smart meters though, as that would completely eliminate this problem.

1.   The reading was submitted on the day requested.
2.    The “estimating” software obviously does not look at previous usage correctly and just doubled the actual.
3.    OVO will NOT install an Economy 10 Smart Meter

Smart Meter support for Economy 10 is coming soon. Once ready, OVO can fit a Smart Meter and set it up for E10 for you.

I can confirm from personal experience that the above-quoted advice works. In my case, the billing period runs from the 17th of each month. The final day of the billing period is therefore the 16th, and my monthly bills cover the period from the 17th of one month to the 16th of the next.

Every month the system urges me to submit a reading on the 16th (the so-called “Best day for next reading”). This recommendation may seem like common sense, but when I followed it my actual readings would invariably be superseded by (none too accurate) system-generated estimates. I tried submitting actual readings as late as 11.45 pm on the 16th, but it didn’t resolve the issue.

Eventually I learned to ignore the “Best day for next reading” - it isn’t the best day. I now submit an actual reading each month on the morning of the 17th; i.e. the first day of the NEW billing period, not the last day of the OLD one. Postponing the reading by just one day has eliminated the problem entirely. No more annoying estimates!

I would urge OVO to fix the confusing “Best day” advice. It’s surprising how frustrating it can be to have your actual readings effectively rejected every month - it implies that you aren’t being believed. It also leads to bewildering fluctuations in past bills as older estimates are silently updated. 

The ‘best day’ for readings experience noted above sounds useful and worth adjusting to reduce any agitation from unexpected estimates. As this isn’t directly seen by the product team it might be worth highlighting in the Ideas section of the forum. 

In the end it was such a simple fix. The problem is, it’s totally counter-intuitive! You’d think a manual closing read would have to be supplied before the end date of the bill, but not so - the bill takes a few days to generate, and the “day after” reading is accepted by the system. 

Just to illustrate, this is the sort of headache-inducing mess I had to to put up with for submitting a reading on the last day of my billing period (i.e. on the 16th, as officially recommended). Despite my regular actual readings, the opening and closing reads in every bill were routinely estimated:

And here’s an example of the cleaner, streamlined bills I regularly get now, simply by submitting the reading one day later than recommended (i.e. on the first day of the new billing period):

Thanks for flagging this, @userJP - I’ll try and find the right team to flag this to. It’s interesting to hear a reading on the 17th from you makes it onto the billing period that ends on the 16th. 

You’re right, @userJP we will bill up to a "closing reading" the day after the end of the bill, i.e. first day of next bill. We’re going to get that message updated so it correctly advisors customers of when to submit their reading. 

Thanks for helping us improve this!