Southern Electric only send me a gas bill twice a year now. The reason? “As part of our ongoing commitment to the environment we want to reduce the amount of paper we use”. Right. Anyway, the latest one arrived last week. I pay by direct debit and usually give no more than a cursory glance to the bill because it’s not as if I have to do anything. This is simply for reference, after all.

And there it was, bold as… well, bold because it was in a bold font. The sum of £636.83. Ouch, I thought. But only for a moment. In fact, that was the amount Southern Electric owed me. Were they going to send it to me? No. Were they going to reduce my monthly standing order of £135 because that was obviously excessive? No. Instead, they were simply going to carry it forward “as payment towards your future bills”.

I called them.

Things don’t start well. It’s the usual phone bingo. The chance to speak to someone about a bill is the last item on the list, of course. Then there’s that sinking feeling as the voice tells you it is transferring you to a ‘live operator’. I wonder which extension they use for the morgue.

Surprisingly, the phone is picked up quickly and I’m speaking to Dawn, who is certainly ‘live’ and cheerful and friendly, to boot. My spirits lift. I tell her why I’m calling. “Really?” she says. “Let’s aheva look.” She does. “You’re right,” she says. Then she does a calculation and reduces my direct debit and tells me she’s sending the extra money direct to my bank account. No moaning, no trying to pursuade me otherwise, no excuses.

A handy refund in time for Christmas and my direct debit amount halved. Result.

I also get my electricity through Southern Electric. They post my bills on-line and I rarely bother to check those, either. There’s a pattern developing here. As I was on a roll, I asked the service rep if she would check my electricity account, too. To be honest, I expected her to say that I owed about £636 and she would just switch the balance from the gas to the electric account.

But no. She said, “Are you sitting down?” It turns out there was a balance in my favour of just over £1,000. “I love this part of my job,” says Dawn.

The main lesson from all this is obviously to check bills carefully. Setting up a direct debit should not be seen as an excuse for avoiding money management.

But that doesn’t excuse Southern Electric. When I first set up a direct debit with them, I paid £50 a month. As soon as they worried that I might use more gas, it rose to £75 and then to £135. Worse yet, these rises were based on estimated meter readings. When these readings were shown to be way off base, did they lower the monthly payments? We know the answer to that. In fact, Southern Electric were borrowing money from me and not even paying me the base rate. I suspect that they should really be paying me a few percentage points of interest on that money.

If it wasn’t for the friendly, sympathetic, and incredibly helpful service rep (her name was Dawn), I would be looking for a new supplier immediately. But the fact that things were dealt with quickly and with no fuss and with an apology and good wishes from the marvellous Dawn means that I’m happy to stay with Southern Electric and take some of the responsibility for keeping an eye on my own money.

Southern Electric got it wrong and then they got it right. Just think how much more right they could have got it had they just sent me a cheque out of the blue and told me I was paying them too much. That would have made Southern Electric truly remarkable in the Godinesque sense of the word.