Concept

Why meter reads belong to the service point, not the meter

Three things change at a water connection over its life: the meter in the ground, the people who live there, and the rate they pay. The connection itself stays put. Where your software keeps usage history decides which of those changes breaks it. Most small-office tools tie usage to the meter, so a meter swap starts the history over. BasicBMS ties it to the connection.

Terms used here

  • Service point. The connection at a property: the tap. It holds the address, the Customer:, the Billing Method: (Metered or Flat) and the Rate Item:.
  • Meter. The device currently measuring that connection. A service point has one meter In Service and keeps the ones it has had before, marked Removed.
  • Read. One cycle's usage: start, end and consumption, for a period.

Nothing needs setting up to follow this article.

How it works in BasicBMS

A read belongs to the service point and remembers its meter. Every read is filed against the service point. The Meter column in Reading History says which device it came from, but the list, and the usage chart beside its heading, is the service point's. When a meter is changed out, the old meter's reads stay in the list and the new meter's reads continue below them. One house, one series.

Each read stores its own consumption. BasicBMS records the Cons of every read when it's taken, rather than working it out later as end minus start. That matters at the edges. A change-out read closes the old meter's last stretch with its own numbers; the next read starts from the new meter's dial. A meter with a Multiplier records real units, not dial clicks. Subtract one meter's end from another meter's start and you get nonsense. Stored consumption never has to.

Screening compares a read with the connection's history. Each read is checked before it reaches a bill, and a suspect one is marked Exception with a reason:

  • Rollback. The end reading is below the start.
  • NegativeConsumption. The usage came out below zero.
  • ZeroUsage. Nothing used, on a connection that normally uses water. A vacant or seasonal place that has never used any isn't flagged.
  • HighUsage. More than three times the average of the last six accepted cycles, by default. Possibly a leak.
  • NoRead. There's no end reading.

The thresholds are company settings, so you can tune them. Flagged reads aren't deleted or quietly corrected. They wait on the Read Exceptions screen, grouped by reason, where you either edit the read (it is screened again when you save) or accept the usage as correct.

Here is the payoff of keeping reads on the service point. The baseline for HighUsage and ZeroUsage is the connection's history, so a new meter doesn't reset it. Its first read is judged against what that house normally uses, not against nothing. If usage were filed by meter, every new meter would start blind for six months, exactly when a bad install or a crossed wire is most likely.

What posts behind it

Nothing. A read is a usage record. No journal entry is written when a read is imported, edited, accepted or changed out. Money moves only when usage is billed, at the price on the service point's Rate Item:, and it posts with that invoice.

When it won’t let you

This meter has reading history and cannot be deleted. Record a change-out instead. A meter with reads is part of the service point's record. It leaves service through Change Out, which keeps its reads.

This service point has readings and cannot be deleted. Use Deactivate to take it out of service. The same rule one level up. A service point with history is deactivated, not deleted.

What this doesn't do

This covers usage history. Billing it is the recurring run's job: on a metered point, the run puts the unbilled reads on the bill by itself (linked below). Reads come in by hand or from a CSV file. And screening doesn't decide anything for you: a flagged read sits in Read Exceptions until a person clears it.

Related

Questions about how this fits your system? Call (509) 955-0770.

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