Submission of meter readings

[David Goodenough <david.goodenough@broadwellmanor.co.uk>]

I have been trying to use UBL for as many things as possible on our farm.  So we send out invoices as both PDF and UBL, and also remittances.

Our electricity is now all metered using AMR (automated meter reading) meters, so they send the readings to the supplier over the LTE phone network and sending meter readings is not an issue, although every now and then they ask for a manual read (by me) to verify that the AMR is working properly and the numbers they are getting agree with those displayed on the meter.

We do not have any gas meters, and anyway gas meters along with the gas they meter are all due for retirement in the not too distant future.

Which leaves water meters.  Ours are in hedges (literally), or along side farm tracks, and have no source of power to them so they are all manual read, so some means of sending the meter readings to our supplier is necessary as they no longer come and read them every time, and I do not want estimated bills.  So I read the meters every 90 days, and send them the readings.

It would be nice to do this using UBL, and my initial thought was to use the UtilityStatement, but that has a required field (the ParentDocumentReference) which means that it has to be sent with or after the invoice/credit note.  I appreciate that changing this from a require field to an optional field would break backward compatibility.

So I guess that means yet another root UBL object.  It would be very similar to the UtilityStatement, and might be named UtilityReadings, and would be almost identical to the UtilityStatement but without the ParentDocumentReference.  All the other fields would remain, even the DocumentCurrencyCode and the AccountingCostCode and AccountingCost, which would be used as requests to the supplier to set up the invoice correctly in the same way as an Order does.  The SubscriberParty then becomes the SenderParty rather then the ReceiverParty which is only a field comment change.