Johannesburg - It’s good news for Joburg residents.
Ratepayers will now be able to choose on which day of the month they would prefer to pay their municipal accounts.
This will happen from February 1 when the project is launched.
Ratepayers have often complained of different billing dates many of which are mid-month which means their monthly budgets being thrown out.
City spokesman Kgamanyane Maphologela, says the project, which is called “billing regionalisation” will see the city streamlining its billing operations which will result in improved billing accuracy, the ability of customers to choose their own due dates, regional meter reading, reduced long estimate billing and audit queries, limiting collection dates and informed reporting per region to afford improvement and problem solving.
Maphologela says the billing regionalisation project essentially means the customers will be billed per the region of their residing areas. It also means the customers will be able to know exactly when the city would come to their area to read their meters.
“We want to work faster and efficiently by improving customers’ experience. The current billing schedule is open all working days of the month, consisting of 21 portions. Each portion caters for each regional township in the city, which strains the physical meter reading that impacts on billing accuracy. Now we want to reduce the number of many portions and rather focus on each region and improve the quality of meter reading,” says Maphologela.
Once the system goes online, customers will have the freedom to choose their due dates between the 15th and the 28th of every month. In the instance that customers don’t choose their due dates, the due date will default to 15 days after billing.
Maphologela says another advantage of the project is that the customers would be able know exactly which region within the city their suburbs fall under, would be able to know the dates when the meter readers would visit their areas to read the meters by tracking this on the city’s website.
The first phase of the project will start in regions A (Midrand), B (Randburg, Northcliff, Rosebank), C(Roodepoort) and E (Sandton). The other regions D (Soweto), F (Inner-city) and G (Lenasia, Ennerdale) will be launched in May 2017.
Customers wishing to choose their own due dates can do so by visiting any of the city’s customer services centres, phone the call centre : 0860 Joburg (562 874) or email to: [email protected]. The meter reading and billing schedules can be obtained by visiting the City’s website: www.joburg.org.za