This guide explains how to set up your charge points in Monta and make the charge points available for your customers to use!
Whether you have purchased Monta directly, or you are being set up by a service provider, this guide is a useful read for you. Even if your account is being operated by a service provider, we strongly recommend getting familiar with these fundamental actions and concepts.
Please note that this guide assumes that your charge points have already been installed and connected to the internet.
1. Your retail location in Monta
In the Monta universe, everything is tied by the central entity of Team. Your retail location is represented as a Team in Monta. In the Team, you can:
- Add and connect your charge points
- Manage the pricing for customers using your charge points
- Invite and grant access to an Admin, who can manage the pricing and troubleshoot of charge points
- Manage a virtual Team Wallet, where all payments and transactions go
- Control the charge point access to customers, as well as charge point availability
2. Fill out your retail location’s company information
Begin by finding the Team and filling out your company information in the Team settings. These company details will be used for charging receipts when EV drivers charge on your charge points.
- If you are using a Trial account, then your account will already have a Team created.
- If you purchased Monta via a service provider, they should already have created a Team for you.
- If you need to create a Team, here is how you can do this.
3. Connect your charge point(s) your Monta account
When a charge point is connected to Monta, this gives access to EV drivers with or without a Monta account to charge on it. Furthermore, the payment for the charge will be collected in your Team’s Wallet. The process to connect a charge point to Monta consists of 3 steps: Physical installation, Integration with Monta and Pairing to the Team.
In this section, we are focusing on the third step, where you connect the charge point to your Monta account. In this process, you need to consider the following:
Charge point access – If you want customers to be able to charge straight away, select Public.
Set charge point active – We recommend to switch the toggle on, so you can experience the full functionality of the charge point, like paid charging.
If you have many charge points at your location, you can use the bulk option to connect many charge points at once. When the charge point shows as Active, it is time to move to the next step.
4. Set up charge pricing and access for your customers
Now it’s time to decide the visibility of your charge points. That depends on the number of parking spots available and how much interest you want to drive to your retail location.
We recommend setting the charge point to Public visibility, which will give access to your customers to charge. When the charge point is set to Public, you also need to create a Public Price Group, which is what EV drivers will pay when charging.
You can select if your charge points visible to all Monta users with the toggle for showing the charge point on the Monta map. When you toggle it on, EV drivers can use Monta Charge to find your charge points. To enhance accessibility, you can also purchase and connect QR stickers to your charge points. This will allow EV drivers to scan and start charging, even without a Monta account.
To make sure your customers will have a spot available to charge when they arrive at your retail location, you can enable reservation. This allows EV drivers to reserve the charge point for a limited amount of time. When they pull up at your store, they can start charging immediately.
If retail location’s parking closes at night, you can create a Scheduled visibility. This allows you to switch from Public to Private visibility at a specific time. In such cases, we strongly encourage to put a note on the charge point, which will show in the Monta map, when the EV drivers find your charging site.
5. How do your customers charge on your charge points
Your charge points are ready to be used and here is how your retail customers can charge!
EV drivers can use Monta Charge to find your charge points and start a charge. If you have enabled reservation they can also reserve a charge point ahead of time.
If you have connected QR stickers to your charge points, your customer can pull up to the charge point, scan the sticker and start a charge.
You are able to offer free charging to loyal customers via charge keys (RFID cards).What you can do is connect a charge key in your Team Wallet, which can be used to start and stop the charging for free. This would require you to physically give the charge key to the customer to start charging, or for you to start the charge for them.
6. Managing funds and payments
Monta uses it’s own Wallet system. Your retail location has a virtual Team Wallet, where all payments for charging are collected. You also use the Wallet to cover expenses for Monta services (i.e. transaction fees) or services provided by a solution provider (subscription purchases).
You can withdraw the revenue from charging at any point to your company’s bank account.
If you have Business or Enterprise Monta plan, and your company is VAT registered, you can request to handle your billing by Monta invoicing. Every invoice comes with a csv file, which contains all your Wallet transactions within the month.
7. Test your setup
Great job! You’re ready to get started now!
We recommend testing your setup by performing a few charges. Once you understand how the system works, you can try more advanced setups using the links we’ve included below.
Feel free to check our Help Center for detailed guides and troubleshooting tips.
If you need help from Monta Support, just go to support.monta.com and create a ticket. Our Support Team will get back to you as soon as possible!
8. Advanced section
Invite an Administrator to the Team
You should invite a person to manage the pricing, exports, withdrawing money, and the charge points of the Team. You can invite them with a phone number or an email. If they do not have a Monta account yet, they will be invited to create one. Make sure to assign them an Admin role in the Team.
Create additional charging fees
You can apply different additional fees to charging, such as a starting fee, charging fee, minute fee or idle fee. These fees are applied per charge point. For example, creating an idle fee is an incentive for EV drivers to unplug and remove their car after they are done charging, so parking spot is vacated. Otherwise, they will pay the fee for blocking access to the charge point.
Enable Roaming on your charge points
If you want to drive more traffic to your retail location’s charge points, we encourage you to enable Roaming. This will make your charge points available on different Roaming platforms, such as Hubject, Google Maps, etc. You can customize how much EV drivers are pay when they access your charge points via a Roaming platform, by creating a Roaming Price Group. Please note that Roaming is only available for Business and Enterprise plans.
Apply cost tracking
You can track the electricity cost for operating your charge points by creating a Cost Group. The charge cost is shown in the charge session summary and in the charges export. You can compare this to the revenue from charging to calculate the profits you’ve made with your parking lot charge points.
Add a payment terminal
For big retail locations, with many charge points, we recommend attaching a payment terminal, which can be used for initiating a charge and as a contactless payment method. Monta works with several types of payment terminals, for example Payter. You will need to configure the terminal and connect it to your Team Wallet.
When the EV driver arrives at your parking lot, they can plug in their car to the charge point and use the payment terminal for contactless payment, which will initiate the charge.