WME Support National Apprenticeship Week

At the end of December I officially had my last day at college, which was called my ‘last day of learning’. I am now just waiting for the dates of my assessments, whilst I finish up my “Project” and ensure all my work is together.

I have now been working with the Billing Team for 4 months. It is very different than what I imagined billing to be like, and I have enjoyed it much more than I expected. As well as the day to day work, I regularly sit in on the billing calls with our supplier, which I am finding useful, as it helps me continue to learn different terminology and understand the many acronyms that come with the energy industry.

I have found it easier to balance my work as billing goes in monthly cycles so I know when I will be busy in billing and when I will have time to do other work. There is a range of work completed each month by the Billing Team.

Each month I support with validating the incoming billing and referring any issues we find – You would be surprised how many invoices fail first validation. Over time, I’ve got much quicker at doing this and more able to do it independently. After validating these I also send meter read reminders for both gas and electricity supplies to our customers where we think there may be issues, e.g where there is a sudden jump in consumption or where there has not been an Actual Read provided in a while. Any reads provided then can be used to validate billing or resolve any issues we have with the billing.

In the last few days of every month, I validate the meter readings submit via our myWME portal. I check through each read to see if it can be sent over to our supplier to be used in the billing. I look for things like if there are the correct number of digits, if the read has increased since the month before and if I need to remove any decimals that are accidentally included within the reads. I also remove any extra reads that may have been put in twice mistakenly.

Alongside working in billing, I am still working in the finance department too. Every day I process the receipts and ensure they are uploaded onto our finance system. I have improved doing this as I now can complete this quickly and independently, while also processing the more difficult receipts. I also send the debtors emails and letters each month.

In the past few weeks, I have been helping the Finance Team with uploading the cheques from customers onto our system and ensuring that they are allocated to the correct accounts. I found that this was a different process than I was used to, but I am getting more efficient with practice.

Around my billing and finance work, I still support the administration of supporting schools contracted with WME. My role specifically focuses on ensuring the required paperwork is issued when a school converts to an academy. I dedicate time each week to go over these conversions and check that we have everything we need. In addition, every few months I check the Government academy conversion spreadsheet so we can note down any that are happening soon to ensure smooth transitions for their energy contracts.

Thanks for reading!