September’s releases deal with the parts of a network that sit outside a standard public charge point: home charge points that owners share with neighbors, charge points that lose their connection, and payments taken by a terminal at the curb. Roaming partners now hear about price changes before they apply, and fleet admins can bring in their vehicles in one upload.
Featured this month: one tariff for every shared home charge point
In Belgium and other countries where company cars account for most new electric vehicle registrations, employers often pay for a charger at the employee’s home and reimburse the electricity it uses. Some operators running these programs also open those home chargers to the public, so other drivers can use them when the owner is not charging. That leaves one charger with three prices to apply: free charging for the employee who owns it, the same terms or a separate rate for the family or neighbors they share it with, and the operator’s public tariff for everyone else. Until now, each charger needed its own free tariff, user group and tariff group to make that work, so a program covering a thousand homes meant a thousand sets of configuration to build and keep up to date.
Why it matters
One tariff group now covers every publicly shared home charger in the program. The owner charges for free at their own charger, the people they share it with get the terms you choose for them, and public drivers pay the public rate, with nothing configured charger by charger. Adding the thousandth home takes the same setup as the first, and a price change happens in one place. Owners keep free charging at home when they open their charger to others, which makes sharing an easier ask. It builds on the two residential updates in our August edition: authentication on home chargers, and home chargers that activate when a resident claims them.
How it works
Two new tariff restrictions, Home charging: charge point owner and Home charging: shared users, sit on the Restrictions tab of a tariff. Set the owner restriction on a free tariff, and only the owner charges for free on their own home charger. Set the shared-users restriction on the same tariff or a separate one to decide what invited drivers pay. When a session starts, the platform works out which group the driver belongs to from the charge point being used and its sharing settings. Anyone who is neither the owner nor a shared user is charged the public tariff in the same group. If you run home charging reimbursement for fleets, this guide to employee home charging covers the wider program.
Network operations and monitoring
Know when a whole site is down. An issue detection rule now checks whether a large share of a location’s charge points has gone offline at the same time. It scans your locations on a schedule, opens one outage issue for the location when the offline share crosses the thresholds you set, escalates or de-escalates it as that share changes, and closes it when the site recovers. Locations with fewer monitored charge points than the minimum you configure are skipped, and charge points you reach only through roaming are left out of the calculation. An operations team gets one issue per affected site to act on, with the scale of the outage attached, in place of an alert for every charge point that dropped. If you have already enabled the rule, there is nothing more to set up.
Charging continues when a charge point loses its connection. A new setting, Allow offline transactions for unknown identifiers, lets eligible public and private charge points on Direct OCPP accept an RFID card or identifier they have never seen while they have no connection to AMPECO. The charge point reports the transaction once it reconnects, and normal online authorization resumes straight away. It is off by default. Turning it on is a choice to accept that some offline sessions start without the usual checks, in exchange for fewer drivers turned away from a working charger at a site with patchy connectivity.
Payments, billing and invoices
Payment terminal sessions that reconcile against the bank statement. For anonymous sessions started through a locally integrated payment terminal, AMPECO can now create a provisional transaction at session start and complete it when the terminal reports the captured card payment. The finished transaction carries the payment reference, the capturing terminal, and the card and payment details the terminal supplies, such as card network and masked card number. The session counts as paid only once that transaction is finalized, which gives finance a record that lines up with bank statements and the processor’s own reports. Embedded terminals are also simpler to set up: one Generic embedded payment terminal integration now covers both authorization rules and optional capture recording, and you can run a separate one for each terminal type on your network.
Partner logos on receipts and invoices. Each partner can now have its own logo on receipts and invoices, in the web view and the PDF. Documents a partner issues carry that partner’s logo, and a single-session receipt or invoice you issue carries the logo of the partner that owns the charge point. Credit receipts and credit notes use the same logo as the original document, so a driver who charged at a hotel sees the hotel’s branding from the first receipt to the last correction.
Roaming
Roaming partners see a price change before it applies. When you schedule a future price change on a tariff shared with an eMSP over OCPI 2.2 or later, the partner now receives the upcoming tariff as soon as you schedule it. Until now, they learned the new price at the moment it took effect. With that notice, a partner can show drivers the new price ahead of time, so the price a driver sees in the partner’s app matches the one they are billed.
Compliance
Fallback messages for CTEP-compliant charge points. Charge points certified under the California Type Evaluation Program (CTEP) have tariff and cost display requirements to meet. You can now set, once at tariff group level, the messages a compatible OCPP 2.0.1 charge point shows drivers when it cannot retrieve tariff or final-cost information from the platform. The platform applies your default currency and syncs the messages to each compatible charge point as it connects, so a fleet of hundreds meets the requirement without anyone configuring charge points one by one.
Fleet
Bulk vehicle import. Organization and partner admins with the right permissions can now create or update many vehicles in one CSV or TSV upload from Vehicles, with an example file to start from. Each row is processed on its own, so one bad row does not hold up the rest, and row-level results appear under bulk operations when the import finishes. Partner-managed vehicles and their user associations stay within the partner’s scope.
In the driver app
Vehicle access on location details. Location details now show which vehicle types a location supports and any maximum vehicle length, whenever that information is configured. A driver towing a trailer or driving a long van can check a site before navigating there. The same information is available to API integrations for operators who build their own apps.
What’s next
AMPECO ships every week, and this edition collects the September releases worth a closer look. Credit notes for partial refunds, which complete August’s partial card refunds, are close behind, along with regional electricity rates for home charging reimbursement, built for markets such as Belgium where home electricity prices vary by region. If you already run AMPECO, your account team can walk you through any of the updates above. If you are evaluating the platform, book a demo and we will show you the ones that fit your network.
