Talk Billing Email - Your mistake and I am paying for it.

[#1]

I just got this email from PlusNet.
Dear Mr xxxx

I’m sorry to tell you that due to a technical problem we have not been charging you for the calls you have made recently.

What happens next?
On your next billing date we will take a payment of £67.29 for all calls that have not yet been billed, in addition to your standard monthly line rental.
Please make sure your payment details are up to date in order that we can take this payment. You can check your current payment details at
You can see a full itemised bill for all the calls you’ve made by visiting:

Please accept my sincere apologies for any inconvenience that has been caused.
This is on top of all the problems I've had with getting emails about my credit limit being reached and having to top up twice when Plusnet had a problem.
Despite logging a ticket for this I've still not received a refund for those top ups. I also want to know why the hell I'm being charged £67 for phone calls when I clearly have or am supposed to have a £55 worth of calls a month and YES you have been taking the money each month. ie The £10 a month has gone out of my account.
Someone needs to call me about this ASAP as this is clearly not good enough. If you have messed up and are still messing up as AFAIK the original problem is STILL NOT resolved (I am still getting credit limit reminders). I now have to fork out £67 for quite what I don't know. If I do not get a call I'll be cancelling my phone with PlusNet and moving to TalkTalk.
You have my mobile number so I urge you to call me tomorrow so a) my top ups can be credited back to me & b) you explain why I am having to pay for your mistake.
Thank you.

[#2]

has that e-mail definitely just been received, this also happened a month or so back and was a complete and utter balls up, it was totally wrong and was withdrawn the following day, or have you actually made these calls?

[#3]

Pierre TBH I've no idea if this is correct or not. Have you ever tried making sense of the phone bill on here? It tells you that you've spent so much on calls but doesn't differentiate if this is within your call allowance or not. It's a complete joke really. Calls I make evenings & weekends are listed as £0.00 charge, calls outside those times are shown as £x.xx.
If we are given £55 a month credit presumably this is for the evening/weekend free calls but there is no way of working out from these how much they've cost me from my £55 credit.
If email doesn't even tell me how long this so called billing problem has been going on so how am I supposed to check? I have no problem paying for calls outside my free evening/weekend limit but if this problem was around for the last 3 months then PlusNet should take the payment over the next 3 months.
I'm seriously becoming tired of having to waste my time sorting out other peoples problems. Oh and to answer your other question yes it was received yesterday but I only just got back from a business trip.

[#4]

unless you are making some weird call, why dont your switch to any time, that is only £5 per month, a lot cheaper than you are paying.  or are you making a lot of calls to mobiles which are charges at any time.
If you go to the phone calls section on the members centre, then VIEW and you get another page with details if you click on itemised bill just over the phone icon, you get a breakdown of the types of cales, click on details and that gives you the calls and costs
not sure if this direct link will work  https://portal.plus.net/plustalk/index.php?page=wlr_itemised_billing&view_bill_date=

[#5]

Thanks.. after my last post I went through all my payments and it seems the last one for the calls outside my plan was taken in August. However since the problem started I've topped up £70 so Plusnet can take this and credit it against the missed payments, as from what I can tell all my top ups were unnecessary and down to the billing/syncing issue anyway which Plusnet have almost admitted anyway.

[#6]

Quote from: SeanM

Pierre TBH I've no idea if this is correct or not. Have you ever tried making sense of the phone bill on here? It tells you that you've spent so much on calls but doesn't differentiate if this is within your call allowance or not. It's a complete joke really. Calls I make evenings & weekends are listed as £0.00 charge, calls outside those times are shown as £x.xx. If we are given £55 a month credit presumably this is for the evening/weekend free calls but there is no way of working out from these how much they've cost me from my £55 credit.

I am confused at what you are getting at?  Your free calls dont come out of any credit, and they will show in your recent calls and itemisation for the bill as 0.00 - they do not make any difference to what is shown in the credit limit section of £55.00.  All chargeable calls come out from the £55.00 total and at the end of the month you are billed for what you have spent in that £55.00

You are not given £55.00 credit a month for calls - it is a credit limit on what you spend on chargeable calls your line rental does not give you £55.00 worth of calls for nothing.

[#7]

Sean,
Bud is right. The £55 isn't a "Free call" allowance! This is the limit of many paid calls you can make in a month, that you will then be billed for at the end of the month. The idea being that it stops anyone running up a shockingly high bill one month by accident.
Your free "inclusive" calls will always be marked as £0.00 in the call itemisation bit and won't come off any limit.
Any call with a price other than £0.00 will be a chargeable call, that you SHOULD get a bill for every month. The problem here is that a few customers like yourself haven't been billed for those calls for a few months in a row... hence the bill now to catch up with what you owe them.
To check if this figure looks right, you can log into your home phone account on portal. Look at each of the last 3 month's bills. All the calls that have a cost next to them need to be paid for.
You should definitely check to see if you would be cheaper using the Anytime package. £5 more per month, but all daytime, evening & weekend calls to numbers starting 01, 02 or 03 are included (up to the 1st hour in any call - if you want a longer call, just hang up after 59 mins and dial again!).
Calls to 0845 & 0870 numbers are now included free, but other 08xx numbers aren't included!! If you are running up calls to 0844 or 0871 or other non-geographic numbers, I can highly recommend making http://saynoto0870.com  a bookmarked favourite site!
You can use their search facility to look up many 08xx numbers and find 01, 02, 03 or 0800 equivalents to dial. (You can either search by the number itself, or the name of the organisation). This has saved me HEAPS of money.
I know this bill must be a shock. But Plusnet aren't charging you for their mistake. They have made a mistake, yes, but it was only to delay charging you for calls you have actually made.
The numbers should all add up if you look up your phone account in the portal.
I don't know how the amounts you've already paid fit into this, but again, looking at your portal area should show this. If you add up the calls, and they total £137 ish pounds, then it is likely that you have paid for £70 of them already and still have £67 outstanding. If you think you have already paid £70 of credit and only made £67 of calls, then you should contact Plusnet to check.
Hope this helps
Mike

[#8]

Hi SeanM,
I'm sorry about the home phone issues that we've had. The email has been sent because we've not been taking payment for the call charges, only the line rental - as others have mentioned, the call credit is there to stop you from running up a large monthly bill. The amount you'll normally be billed for call charges is the amount of credit that's been used up over the month, that's why the credit limit is reset on your billing date.
Unfortunately over the past couple of months we've not been able to take the payment (as stated in the email). That's why it's added up to the £67 mentioned - however your top ups to the call credit have been removed from this total (so if you topped your credit up with say £50 today, the amount you'll be charged on your billing date would drop to £17 for example). xpcomputers has explained this above.
If you'd like me to take a look for you and make sure of anything please let me know, and sorry that we haven't able to take the call charges.

[#9]

OK I did confuse the free calls with the £55 credit limit of paid for calls as I didn't see why I'd need a credit limit on paid calls but I see the logic in it now. Now that is cleared up my account still needs to be fixed. I've already paid the £67 as I was forced to make top ups when in fact PlusNet hadn't been taking the money for chargeable calls.
Can someone from Plusnet please look into this and get back to me asap.

[#10]

Mike I've checked again and it seems that the £67 is on top of the £70 so the figures you quoted were about correct. However what still irks me about this situation is a) how long its been going on b) I am paying for it as yes I've made the calls but now just before December I've got to fork out 2 or 3 months worth of call charges. I've never had cause to complain about Plusnets broadband service but this whole situation regarding my calls is laughable. The email that was sent to me should have given me details of how long you've not been charging me and broken things down as I've had to sit down and trawl through it myself to make sure you are taking the correct amounts.
Thanks for the other pointers.

[#11]

Matt could you explain why there is a £35 admin charge to change just my home phone product? It seems some what excessive.

[#12]

Hi SeanM,
Thanks for your time on the phone earlier, hope that helped - please let me know if there's anything else we can do for you, and sorry for the confusion.

[#13]

Cheers for the help Matt. Glad it's all sorted now and I've made the changes to my phone product & this time the admin fee didn't come up.

[#14]

Glad we got things sorted for you.
Give us a shout if we can help with anything else.