The last installment analyzed cut-off fee (or reconnect fee or whatever you call your fee) trends over the four years of the Utility Fee Survey – 2012, 2015, 2017, and 2019.

Based on the data, I don’t believe some utilities are charging enough for their cut-off fee.

How do you go about setting your cut-off fee? One option is to compare your utility to neighboring utilities and simply follow what they are doing. But is that really the best way to go about it? A better option is to calculate your costs and establish a fair and equitable fee.

This issue unveils a new cut-off fee calculator to help you determine if your cut-off fee is sufficient. But first, let’s look at what goes into calculating a fee…

GFOA best practice regarding fees

The following paragraph is from the Government Finance Officers Association (GFOA) website best practices regarding Establishing Government Charges and Fees:

Calculate the full cost of providing a service in order to provide a basis for setting the charge or fee.

  • Full cost incorporates direct and indirect costs (including operations and maintenance), overhead, and charges for the use of capital facilities. Examples of overhead costs include: payroll processing, accounting services, computer usage, and other central administrative services.
  • One useful tool for calculating service costs is Activity Based Costing (ABC). ABC assigns costs to the activities required to deliver a service and can be more accurate than traditional costing methods.
  • The associated costs of collection need to be addressed.

Even if your utility isn’t a government entity, this is good advice to follow in setting fees, including your cut-off or reconnect fee.

Activity-based costing for cut-off fees

When determining how much your cut-off fee should be, it’s helpful to analyze the activities required to complete the process. These activities include:

  • Preparing the cut-off list
  • Delivering final notices (if you use one)
  • Disconnecting delinquent accounts
  • Collecting payments from cut-off accounts
  • Reconnecting accounts
  • Dealing with escalated calls from unhappy customers

Included in these activities are the following costs – labor (including fringe benefits), fuel, wear-and-tear and depreciation for vehicles, and consumables (paper, toner, ink, pens, and pencils, etc.)

What is your fringe benefit rate?

An often-overlooked component of the labor cost of any fee is fringe benefits. There are the obvious payroll-related expenses of FICA, Medicare, retirement, and employer-paid health insurance. But that’s not all – don’t forget paid time off.

If you have a full-time employee who earns three weeks of vacation a year, one sick day per month, and eight paid holidays per year, that’s 35 days each year this employee is paid, but doesn’t work. That’s an effective fringe benefit rate of 13.46% (280 non-working hours divided by 2080 annual paid hours).

The U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics research indicates the fringe benefit rate is 60.51% for state and local government and 42.65% for private industry. If you’re interested in how the BLS arrived at these numbers, please see Table 1 in this press release from September of last year.