Allocate surface water to the additional costs
In many regions, a new category has been added to the water bill since the beginning of 2012. In other regions, on the other hand, surface water has long been an integral part of the water bill and is allocated to the ancillary costs by the landlords.
Surface water - you should know that
When surface water is mentioned in your water bill, it generally refers to rainwater that is fed into the sewerage system via your sealed surfaces. In most areas, the surface water reaches the sewage treatment plants via the sewage system and causes additional work and ancillary costs.
- Usually wastewater treatment costs are billed with a fixed factor. The amount of wastewater that you are charged is usually based on your drinking water consumption. This is verified by your water meter. You are already allocating the invoice amount for drinking water and wastewater to the ancillary costs.
- In the case of surface water, it is not so easy to determine which property owner has to pay how much rainwater. That is why the water boards have sent out questionnaires to the homeowners. In these sheets you, as the owner, have indicated how tall you are property and which surfaces are sealed and how. Different types of sealing are assigned different levels of factors. Based on these values, the area to be calculated was determined for each affected property.
- The water boards have calculated what amount they will charge the customer per m² of property. In doing so, the water boards usually use average values that indicate how much surface water has accumulated in the region in certain periods of time.
- Multiplying your area to be calculated and the specified cost factor results in the fee you have to pay for discharging the surface water.
In order to be able to check the correctness of the annual bill of your water supplier, ...
So you put the surface water in the ancillary costs
Using your previous year's operating cost statement, you can easily check how you can allocate the costs by m² extra costs on your tenants. You can now apply this analogously to the surface water costs.
- Take your water bill for the total amount to be allocated for surface water. This is made up of the consumption price for your sealed area and the basic surface water charge. You allocate this total amount to 100 percent as ancillary costs on the total square meters of your property. The best way to do this is with an Excel spreadsheet.
- For each apartment you now calculate the surface water portion to be allocated to the additional costs according to the living space in m².
- To do this, divide the total surface water amount to be allocated by the total square meters of the property and multiply the result by the m² area of the respective apartment. As a result, you will now receive the portion of the surface water to be allocated to the individual apartment as ancillary costs.
- Check your allocation of surface water to the additional costs by adding up all the proportions. The sum should exactly correspond to the total amount of surface water to be allocated.
Calculation example for the allocation of surface water to the additional costs
The following example for better comprehensibility.
- Your rented property has a total area of 300 m².
- It consists of three apartments. Apartment one has 85 m², apartment two has 125 m² and apartment three has 90 m² of living space.
- The total amount of surface water that you want to allocate to the additional costs is 120 euros.
- So now you calculate for apartment one as follows: 120 euros / 300 m² * 85 m² and receive 34 euros for additional costs for apartment one of the total surface water amount to be allocated. For apartment two you receive 50 euros and for apartment three you receive 36 euros.
- If you now add all three proportions together again as a trial, then you come back to your 120 euros surface water costs.
As you can see, it is quite easy to apportion the surface water costs to the utility costs.
