We work day in and out to encourage the adoption of EV technologies: We know that the best way to do so is by empowering you with the best tools in the market, so you can EV better.
By making managing fleets easier, providing charging better, installing charge points smoother and more, we are doing our part to help the EV industry and infrastructure grow.
Check out what Monta brings to you this month on the Portal: improvements and brand-new tools.
One payment terminal for all your charge points within a site: Welcome Payter integration!
To give EV drivers a way to pay with a credit card directly on DC chargers is slowly becoming a pounding requirement. For a large operator this may be hard to implement but we can help make your life easier by giving you the means to set up one payment terminal for all your charge points within a site instead of doing it one-by-one. Say hello to Payter!
The challenge many large operators face when dealing with this requirement from EV Drivers is that renting multiple payment terminals for a site is costly or the solutions available today are not tech-driven, and often require you to manually update prices for each payment terminal on site. Further, payments happening on these payment terminals are not accessible in charge point management systems because there is no payment integration, leaving you with little to no option to handle your payments in one tool.
This is why Monta integrated with the terminal provider Payter. Now we can offer a scalable and transparent solution for all large charge point operators that need to provide their visitors with a direct payment option via credit card.
Soon, operators will be able to set up 1 terminal for a complete site and manage everything directly from Monta, instead of having to invest in multiple terminals. You can set up a payment terminal for multiple charge points or a site, and manage the price groups for the charge points directly from Monta as normal. Of course, the prices displayed on the Payter terminal displayed to the EV driver reflect 1:1 what you set up in the Portal.
The entire money flow, from EV driver to you, will be visible and accessible in the Monta Wallet system, so that you have the full overview of your revenue stream in one place – no matter what the payment source is (payment terminals, the app, charge keys, etc).
Once you set up the payment terminal, you can find and adjust all further settings related to Payter in the Wallet section in the Monta Porta under ‘Payment Terminal’.
It’s like killing two birds with one stone – save money by setting up only one terminal per site and save time by only having one terminal to manage and maintain.
Improve charge point utilisation thanks to better insights on wasted potential
The horror for every charge point operator: idle time – the time the charge point is occupied but not charging. Minimise idle time and maximise your charge point utilisation with our improved insights section. How? With insights that can help you understand loss potential and spot room for improvements.
A detailed breakdown of the reasons why a charge point might not be charging when it should, and what it is doing instead is therefore valuable knowledge. The time when the charge point is occupied but not charging is known as ‘idle time’. During idle times you, as a site owner or operator, are not making money from the user charging, and cannot offer the charge point to other users instead, which bottom line results in revenue loss.
We have improved our insights section in the Monta Portal so that you can drill down on your ‘idle times’ in more detail. In order to do so, look out for the charge point state named ‘Busy’ in your charge point’s overview or charging site overview. The status ‘Busy’ indicates that your charge point is occupied, and if you hover over the status, you will find the reason why it is busy e.g. Busy-Charging, Busy-Non-Charging, Busy-Blocked, Busy-Reserved, and so on.
Next to helping you understand the utilisation of your charge points, this data can greatly assist in helping you answer business-critical decisions such as:
- How much “lost business” do I have?
- Should I start charging idle fees to decrease this time?
- Should I enable SmartQueue to notify drivers to move their cars for the next user?
- Based on the current utilisation of the charge points, is it the right time for me or my client to add a new charge point?
You can probably think of a few more. Anyhow, we hope this improvement in our insights section comes in handy for you to plan your next steps to conquer the EV charging network.
Spot disconnected charge points within a heartbeat
Charge points can be disconnected for multiple reasons. Maybe you planned to connect your charge point to Monta later during the integration process and simply forgot. Or maybe your charge point disconnected due to some technical reasons such as bad internet connectivity or a new firmware update.
In either case, you may want to spot these outliers quickly! Why? Well, because disconnected charge points mean that they are not live and hence, not serving anyone for charging, nor generating any revenue for you if you are operating public charge points.
In the Monta Portal, you can now quickly identify disconnected charge points on the Team charge point table and overall charge point table. Simply filter for ‘No connection’ in the respective charge point list and take immediate action to get your charge points up and running again.
Beta Offering: Automate how and when your fleet is charging with Charge Profiles
Enterprise Fleet customers can now automate when and how exactly their fleet cars are charged by simply linking a Charge Profile to a charge key.
As an enterprise fleet manager, you have no way to choose how much the cars should be charged (e.g. if you want to charge 100% instead of 80%), nor can you schedule when the charge should happen (when you want cars in your fleet to charge at different times or if you want a car to be ready at a certain time). Lastly, you also can’t really leverage the use of intelligent features such as SmartCharge to save money or to meet any of your company’s sustainability goals that require you to charge when energy is greenest.
Good news – this is solved now with the introduction of ‘Charge Profiles’ for fleets. With this beta feature, you can now set up ‘Charge Profiles’ that allow you to define a set of charging preferences in the Monta Portal, and link that charge profile to RFID cards. Once the RFID card is used the first time, the charge starts as defined in the ‘Charge Profile’.
To give an example: With charging profiles, you can make sure to charge your fleet when electricity is cheapest, but ensure that your cars are ready for pickup at 8:00 Monday to Friday every week. All your employees have to do is tap the charge key on the charge point to start a charge as usual.
There are many other scenarios, we could paint, but you should just try it out yourself. Decide when and how you want your fleet charged and ready for the next work day.
Pro tip: if you use this feature and integrate your fleet, you have a fully automated solution that charges your fleet based on your charging preference and knows how much your cars need charging.
Make sure to turn on the ‘Beta’ toggle in your profile in order to be able to use our Beta features. Here is how you can do that.
A new field for better invoice tracking: EAN number
With the addition of a field for European Article Number (EAN), you can now link Monta invoices in your system much easier.
Any installer, manufacturer, or operator that needs to use an EAN number to track and reference their invoices is getting good news today! We added an optional input field in the Team settings and operator settings called “EAN number”, right below the “PO number” field.
Now you can easily manage, track and customise your Monta invoices. A small but effective little addition.
Charge Point Integrations – New models added
We have added 17 new charge point models the past month, making us integrated with 260 models in total now! See the full list here (available in English).
Our Public Roadmap for the Monta Portal is here!
Our Public Roadmap is live and ready to create full transparency on what you and your fellow Monta users wish to see in the Monta Portal and the status of us taking these wishes into reality. Of course, you can also submit your own ideas on feature requests or improvements right there!
Explore our Public Roadmap here.
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