The Texas bill stack, calculated rather than estimated.
A Texas residential bill is energy, delivery, gross receipts tax, the PUC assessment and sales tax — each with its own base and its own exemptions. Conduit computes all of it, and quotes from the same engine that invoices.
Off your desk
You stop maintaining tax tables in a spreadsheet and discovering the exemption was wrong at audit.
Without this
What this looks like today.
Tax tables end up in a spreadsheet. Somebody maintains them, mostly. The rates are not the hard part — the hard part is which base each one applies to, which jurisdiction a service address actually sits in, and which exemptions apply.
The residential exemption is the one that gets missed in both directions: charged where it should not be, or not charged where the customer does not qualify. Neither is discovered quickly, and the correction runs backwards across every affected bill.
There is also a quieter problem. The quoting tool and the billing engine are usually different code. So the estimate a customer was shown at sale and the invoice they receive are computed by two things that were only ever meant to agree.
How it works
Tax & tariffs, in detail.
The Texas bill stack, calculated rather than estimated — and the same engine behind your quotes.
Sales tax by jurisdiction, with the exemption applied where it belongs
Sales tax is resolved by ZIP and jurisdiction against the service address, and the Texas residential exemption for electricity is applied where it applies. It is driven by the normalised service address rather than a billing address someone typed.
TDU delivery tariffs by utility and rate class
Delivery charges come from the published tariff for the customer's utility and rate class — the monthly customer charge, the per-kWh distribution charge, demand where it applies, and the riders. The same tariff data is what settlement uses to reprice a delivery invoice.
Gross receipts tax and the PUC assessment
The Miscellaneous Gross Receipts Tax applies to utilities serving incorporated municipalities, at a rate that steps with the city's population — so it is a jurisdiction lookup, not a flat percentage. The PUC assessment applies alongside it on its own base. Both are computed rather than approximated.
One engine for the quote and the bill
The bill estimator that produces a quote calls the same rating and tax path that will invoice the customer. What they were promised and what they are charged are computed by one thing, so they cannot drift.
At a glance
- Sales tax by ZIP and jurisdiction, with the residential exemption applied where it belongs
- TDU delivery tariffs by utility and rate class
- Miscellaneous Gross Receipts Tax and the PUC assessment
- A bill estimator that quotes from the same rates that will invoice the customer
Connected
What this leans on.
Nothing here is a separate product with an integration between it and the rest. These are the capabilities this one shares a record and a ledger with.
Questions
The ones we actually get.
What is the Texas residential exemption?
Texas exempts residential use of electricity from state sales tax. The complication is that it depends on the premise and the jurisdiction rather than on a flag somebody sets, which is why Conduit resolves it from the normalised service address instead of trusting a field on the account.
What is the Miscellaneous Gross Receipts Tax?
A Texas tax on utilities doing business in incorporated cities and towns, with the rate stepping according to the municipality's population band. Because it turns on which municipality the service address is in, it is a jurisdiction lookup — treating it as a single flat rate is the usual source of error.
Do you keep TDU tariffs current?
Tariffs are maintained as reference data per utility and rate class, and the same data serves both customer billing and settlement repricing — so a tariff that is stale would show up as systematic variances against every delivery invoice, not only as a quiet billing error.
Is the quote computed the same way as the bill?
Yes, and that is the point of building the estimator on the billing path rather than beside it. A quoting tool that only approximates the bill is a customer complaint with a delay on it.
The rest of the platform
One customer record, one ledger, one audit trail.
See it against your own book.
Bring a month of real transactions and a TDSP invoice. Tax & tariffs is easier to judge against data you already argue about than against a demo tenant.