Read on to learn about the Bill Hero results screen, or take an interactive tour.

Bill Hero results screens have these four components:

Bill Hero displays both the fuel type and annualised savings in the headline on this screen.

Bill Hero offers filters to help you understand price changes and plan rankings in different scenarios.

Here's what each of those filters means:

Bill Hero has adopted the Green star rating model developed by Greenpeace and the Total Environment Centre for the Green Electricity Guide.

All plans displayed in Bill Hero results will include the relevant Green star rating for the retailer. If the retailer offers multiple plans, then the same rating will appear on each of those plans.

You can filter your results by Green rating, to display only the plans from retailers which are rated at or above your chosen Green star level.

The possible settings are:

Your results will load by default with the 'Show all' setting enabled. You can use this filter to narrow down the set of retailers. Plans will be ranked by price within the Green filter setting you choose, so it's easy to find the best priced plan that also meets your Green ranking requirements.

A small number of retailers have not been ranked by the Green Electricity Guide. Any plans from unranked retailers will be excluded from your results if you apply a Green filter option other than 'Show all'.

GreenPower is a government scheme that allows you to buy renewable electricity, and support renewable generation, by voluntarily paying a price uplift for some or all of the kWh you consume. When you buy GreenPower, the scheme ensures that an equivalent amount of kWh has or will be generated by renewable generators and contributed to the energy distribution pool.

Retailers offer GreenPower in various proportions of your overall consumption - all participating GreenPower retailers offer 100% GreenPower, meaning that the price uplift is applied to all your kWh consumption. Some also offer GreenPower plans where the GreenPower price uplift is applied to a proportion of your kWh consumption proportions, such as 25%, 50%, or 75%. Not every retailer supports every proportion.

The GreenPower filter allows you to select your desired GreenPower proportion, and it will display the plans from those retailers that support that proportion.

No matter what proportion GreenPower you choose, all the relevant plans are always ranked by price, and the special 'Your Bill' plan is always included, so you can see what the price difference will be for any GreenPower plan vs your uploaded bill.

Energy retailers often offer plans with eligibility criteria, so you can access that plan and price only if you are a member of a particular club or society, or some other requirement.

It's becoming increasingly common for retailers to apply restrictions to their solar plans by defining a maximum solar system rating. Bill Hero can handle these restrictions by filtering out any ineligible solar cap plans based on known information about your solar system size.

We call these 'restricted plans', and we exclude them by default from your results and from your savings calculations. You can use the Restricted Plans toggle to show or hide these kinds of plans in your results.

Energy retailers often offer incentives and sign-up bonuses along with their plans. These incentives can be introduced or retired at any time by the retailer. It's common that a retailer might introduce a sign-up bonus as part of a time-limited campaign for new customer acquisition.

Bill Hero will include the dollar value of any cash or cash-equivalent incentive in the comparison—retailers sometimes offer non-cash incentives like football jerseys or movie tickets, and Bill Hero does not include these in the comparison. The dollar value of the incentive will always be prorated over one year, even though the retailer will often pay the entire incentive in the first month. For example, a $120 incentive will manifest as a $10 reduction to a monthly bill. We actually calculate these incentives by days in the billing period as a proportion of a full year rather than months, but you get the idea.

By default, your results screen will load with the Incentives filter turned on. This means that the prorated cash value of any incentives will be included in the calculation for that plan, making it move up the rankings because it will become cheaper. We think this is the right approach because incentives represent genuine value to you as a consumer, and spreading the incentive out over a year rather than including it all in the first month avoids the issue where a plan might artificially rank well only because the first-month bill price is artificially low.

Discounts are a common feature of energy retail and marketing, but it's often very hard to understand what the real-world impact of a discount will be. Discounts can apply either to the supply charge components of your bill, or to the consumption charges, or to both, and they can be conditional or guaranteed. Guaranteed discounts will always be applied to your bill, but conditional discounts usually will be applied only if you pay on time, or for some plans, there may be additional incremental discounts available if you agree to pay by direct debit or pay in regularly scheduled instalments, or if you pay in advance.

The Pay on Time filter allows you to see how prices will change and potentially how the rankings will re-order depending on your actual behaviour as a billpayer.

By default, your Bill Hero results screen loads with the Pay on Time filter set to 'Direct Debit'. This tells Bill Hero to include all conditional discounts in the calculations, including any incremental additional discounts, meaning that the alternative plans are shown in their best light and will reveal the maximum savings available to you. You can then choose an alternative setting to see how prices and rankings change depending on your payment behaviour.

Some plans are available only to customers who agree to pay in advance, by scheduled instalment, or by direct debit. These plans will only be displayed if the Pay on time filter is set to 'Direct Debit', and will be filtered out if you change to on of the other settings for this filter.

The other options for the Pay on time questions are 'Yes', 'Sometimes' and 'No''.

Retailers usually have multiple plans available at different price points. This filter will retain only the best-priced plan offered by each retailer and remove all their other plans.

Bill Hero displays the results ranked by price in a horizontal carousel if you're on a computer, or in a vertical list if you're on a mobile. Each plan in the comparison is represented by a card that shows the plan name, the retailer, any additional relevant details about that plan, and the calculated annualised savings available to you under that plan. The plan with the greatest savings for you is at the top of the list of ranked results.

There is an arrow button to the left and right of the carousel, which allows you to scroll through the results, or you can use the horizontal navigation bar below the results to jump through the ranked list. Each 'block' in the navigation bar represents a page of four results, and the blue block indicts the current page you're viewing.

The card for each plan includes the 'Plan price', which is the price that we calculate you would have been charged under this plan for the same usage and time period as documented in your bill.

You can expand the Plan Price to see a detailed breakdown of all the bill components and the pricing for each. Click on the question mark icon to reveal a tooltip containing the link to open the detailed results.

The big green 'Details' button will take you to the details page for each plan.

We also include a calculation of how this plan compares to the Default Market Offer, or DMO.

In Victoria, DMO is specified for single rate and single rate + controlled load tariffs with a consumption price per kWh and a supply price per da. This is the same way that retailers define pricing for their plans. Bill Hero treats DMO as just another plan on offer and calculates the effective price for the consumption and time duration of your bill, using the DMO pricing, then expresses on each card the % more than or % less than the Default Market offer.

In the other NEM states, DMO is specified as an annual price for a reference annual kWh consumption level. Bill Hero calculates what each plan would cost for a full year at the reference consumption level, and then expresses on each card the % more than or % less than the Default Market offer.

The results and prices for each plan displayed by Bill Hero are calculated based on the time period, tariff type and consumption levels as specified in your bill, and the pricing offered under each plan. The tag cloud displays the input parameters that were taken from your bill.

In this example, we can see that the prices for the alternative plans are calculated on the basis of Postcode 4558 location - meaning the Energex distribution zone in QLD, a billing period starting 17/10/2020 and ending 20/01/2021 inclusive, Peak consumption of 1,073 kWh, Controlled Load consumption of 575 kWh, Solar exports of 1,099 kWh, Premium FiT tariff, and a Concession of $89.64