Understanding Multiple Service Periods - Single Family Homes

This article is specific for residents who live in a single family house, not an apartment community. Please see “Housing Type Overview - Understanding Conservice Billing” for information on if this article applies to you or not.

If you are being billed directly by a service provider as well as Conservice for a certain utility, please see "What are vacant charges and why am I receiving them?" 

If you are looking to understand how the timeframe works with your service dates and due dates, please see "Billing in Arrears - Service Periods vs. Due Date."

Why are there multiple utility charges on my bill? Or… Why am I missing a utility charge on my bill?

To clarify why this took place on this month's bill and why it sometimes happens on other statements, it helps to understand the process of how your bills are generated. 

Conservice manages the utilities on behalf of your property management company. This means we receive, process, audit, and compile all utility bills for your home, and then send you a statement each month showing these charges. Your Conservice bill is prepared using the utility statements from your local utility providers that maintain the meters, collect reads, and control the rates applied for your utility consumption. Because of the way this process works, the billing cycle for your Conservice statement may not always correspond with the utility service cycle. This delay is typically inevitable, but can sometimes be longer because of postal delay, changes in service cycle length, additional processing time, or other factors. 

What happens then is, if we receive two statements from the utility providers within the billing preparation period, both statements will be included on your monthly bill to account for the delay in the service cycles. This reduces the delay from when you use the utilities to when you receive your statement and reduces the likelihood that you will need to pay a large final bill when you move out. 

This same issue with the billing cycles not corresponding with one another may also cause you to not receive a utility charge on your bill that you are normally charged for. In this case, instead of not sending out your bill or delaying your bill because we have not received the bill from the provider,  we send out the utility charges that we have received and exclude the ones that we are missing. This does not mean that these charges will never be billed to you. It just means that they will be included in a future month's statement instead.