Prepayment falls under Technology Group in Eskom and is managed by the Protection Telecomms Measurement and Control (PTM&C) Department. Because Prepayment operation is not clearly contained in a single resource environment, the operations are spread over two different areas as part of the PTM&C Department.

The Prepayment Metering part is officially managed along with Conventional Metering, DC Systems, Protection and Telecommunications. The Vending and Key Management functions are managed by the Prepayment Development area. To ensure good integration and inter-compatibility, the metering resources are actually permanently part of the Prepayment Development work although they still report to Control Technologies as well. Refer to the Contacts page for some details of this relationship.

All the day-to-day operations in the Eskom Regions are still managed by the individual Regions themselves. There are several permanent forums that the Regions use to consolidate all important issues. Three of the most prominent ones are:

The National Prepayment Forum (NPF) who co-ordinates all vending related issues in Regions. The Measurements Study Committee is formally responsible for all metering issues in Eskom, and the Prepayment Technical Advisors (PTA) forum looks at general prepayment meter operational issues in the Regions.

Eskom has installed Prepayment Meters for more than 4.3 million domestic customers since 1990. All the original proprietary Prepayment Meters have now been phased out in favour of STS Meters. There are currently a number of manufacturers that supply Eskom with STS approved Meters. Additional meter related information is provided under the Meters page.

In addition to the meters, there are also a number of different vending machine solutions to sell prepayment electricity for Eskom. The original Offline Vending solution consisted of System Master Stations (SMSs) and Credit Dispensing Units (CDUs). All these old offline vending machines have been removed by Eskom and replaced by the Online Vending Clients.