Your Chargers Are Working. So Where Is the Money?

We get this call often from property managers. 

"I haven't received my payment from the charging station vendor.

What's going on?"

The charging stations are up and running.

Residents are using them.

The revenue's being collected.

It’s just not reaching the property, and usually nobody noticed for a while.

There are two reasons this usually happens, and they both go undetected.

Network fees went unpaid

Most charging networks charge a monthly or annual fee to keep your stations active and connected. If that fee goes unpaid, your revenue gets held.

The invoice is often sitting in a spam folder or going to an email address that belonged to someone who left two years ago. Because everything runs through ACH, there's no bounced check and no failed transaction to alert anybody. The money just quietly stops showing up.

The payment account was never activated.

Many vendors require the property to set up a third-party payment account, usually Stripe, before revenue can be released. If that account was never fully activated during onboarding, the earnings sit in limbo.

Nobody flags it, because on paper nothing is broken. The chargers work. The stations are collecting. It's that last step, the part where the money reaches you, that never got finalized.

Nobody is going to call you

Don't expect the vendor to tell you they are holding your money. Most will not reach out when payments stall, and there's no incentive to. It falls to the property to catch it, and if you don't know what you are looking for, months can pass before anyone asks the question.

What to look for:

If something feels off, four things are worth checking before you call anyone:

• Find out which email address your charging network sends invoices to, and confirm somebody still reads it.

• Check whether your payment account was fully activated, not just created during onboarding.

• Compare what the stations reported earning against what actually landed in the account, for the last two quarters.

• Make sure somebody at the property owns this specific task. Revenue that belongs to everyone belongs to nobody.

  
  

  

  
  

Where REVS fits in

This is part of what station management actually looks like. REVS watches for the missed invoices, the accounts that were never switched on, and the gaps between what the stations earned and what reached the property.

We catch it before it becomes a conversation about several quarters of missing revenue.

If you have EV charging at your property and something looks off with the payments, it's worth a look. 

Our multifamily EV charging page explains how we manage stations, and you can contact REVS and we'll take a look at yours.

Best,