Think about your fridge for a moment...
How do you buy your groceries? Do you get your salary at the end of the month and use all your money to buy milk ? Probably not.
You can't really predict how much you will use in the month and even if you could, you still have other things that you need to buy as well.
Like most households, you probably keep as much as you can in your bank account (or your purse), and buy what you need when you need it.
You buy a bit of milk, and a bit of everything else according to your needs.
It's your "purse" in the Unimet cloud. This is a wallet that was selected by your estate or landlord to manage your financial purchases relating to where you live.
It is the tool that has been put in your hands to manage the billing and payment of your rentals, levies, fixed monthly charges, as well as the recharging of your prepaid meters. The Smartzone is not a traditional prepaid vending platform.
In a traditional prepaid vending scenario, a consumer would take money from their bank and buy prepaid tokens according to the Rands value that they want. All that money gets converted into a prepaid token for a specific meter. If they needed to top up a different meter, they would take more money out, and buy another prepaid token. Any rentals or levies that became due to their estate or landlord would be paid separately from their prepaid purchases.
For a consumer using the Smartzone, things are different.
The Smartzone was developed to automatically take care of the payment of your invoices and the recharging of your meters. It was designed to bring together the management and payment of all your property expenses all from one place.
The Smartzone cannot know how much electricity or water you will need in a month. And even if it did, it cannot know when you will need it. It wouldn't make sense to use all your money that you have in your wallet to top up your electricity meter, just like it does not make sense to take all your money and buy milk at the beginning of the month. So, it recharges your meters only when it needs to, when they are running low and there is a limit to how much it will recharge at any one time.
It needs to have a maximum limit. Imagine what would happen if you deposited R5000 into your wallet and all that money went to top up your water meter, leaving your rental unpaid and your electricity meter empty.
Another good reason for having a top up limit is because of tiered municipal tariffs.
A tiered tariff is where the cost of each unit gets more expensive as you use more in the month. To use our milk metaphor again, imagine a scenario where the first liter of milk in a month is free, but the second time you buy another liter of milk, the cost is R10, and the third time you buy milk the cost is R20. Would you buy 3 liters of milk altogether at the beginning of the month? What if you don't use the third bottle this month and you only use it next month (pretend it's long life milk). You would have spent R20 this month on a bottle of milk that if you had waited until next month it would have been free.
Many properties have municipal tariffs that are on a tiered structure. By placing a recharge limit, and only topping up when credits on a meter run low, we maximise the chance of not spending money on a higher tier unless its absolutely needed.