Most electricity problems I get called about are not really electricity problems. They’re paperwork problems that turned into money problems because nobody could find the paperwork.
So here’s a list. Five documents, one folder — paper in a drawer or a folder on your computer, doesn’t matter, just one place. It takes twenty minutes to build the first time and about two minutes a year after that.
1. The Electricity Facts Label
The EFL is the one-page standardized sheet the Public Utility Commission requires for every residential plan. It’s where the price actually lives.
Important detail most people don’t know: the commission’s rule requires the average price display at 500, 1,000, and 2,000 kilowatt-hours. Three numbers, not one. If a plan’s advertised rate only looks good at one of those, the label shows you that, which is exactly why it exists and exactly why sales copy quotes a single figure instead.
Keep the version you signed under, with the date. Plans change. A label you pulled off a website last spring is not evidence of what you agreed to.
2. The Terms of Service
Under the PUCT’s disclosure rule, §25.475, your contract isn’t one piece of paper. The rule defines the contract as the terms of service document, the Electricity Facts Label, and the Your Rights as a Customer document — together.
The terms of service is the boring one and it’s the one that decides fights. It carries the length of the term, the early-termination provisions, and the language about what happens at the end. The same rule requires a term contract to state that you’ll roll automatically onto a default renewal product, and that the default has to be month-to-month if you don’t act.
That sentence, buried in a document nobody reads, is responsible for more shocking bills than any storm.
3. Your Rights as a Customer
This is the third leg of the contract, and it’s the one to hand somebody who’s in trouble.
It covers disconnection, deposits, complaints, and the protections you have that don’t depend on anybody’s goodwill. For context on how those work: the PUCT says a disconnection notice date must be at least 10 days out from when the notice is issued, and it lists circumstances where a provider may not authorize disconnection at all — including certain billing disputes, payment arrangements, weather emergencies, and medical conditions.
Nobody wants to need this document. Keep it where somebody could find it anyway.
4. The contract expiration notice
This is the one that isn’t in the folder yet, because it hasn’t come. Put a placeholder in there so you notice when it does.
The PUCT’s rules require a provider to notify residential customers at least 30 days before a contract expires. That notice tells you the date, and the date is what protects you: the commission says you may switch without an early-termination charge as long as the switch is no earlier than 14 days before the expiration date in the notice.
The notice usually arrives by email. It looks like every other email from a utility. Flag it the day it shows up and put the expiration date on the calendar you actually use.
5. Twelve months of your own bills
Not a legal document. Still the most useful thing in the folder.
Twelve consecutive months of bills gives you your actual usage pattern — your real summer, your real winter, your real shoulder months. Everything anybody tells you about what a plan will cost is a guess until it’s run against those numbers. It’s also the single fastest way to tell whether a bill went up because the rate changed, because the delivery charges changed, or because you ran the air conditioner harder in a hot August.
If you’re a business, add whatever demand or interval data your meter produces. If you don’t know whether you have that, ask — the answer changes what’s worth quoting.
The sixth item, if somebody’s helping you
If you’re working with a broker, their required disclosure belongs in the folder too.
The commission’s broker rule, §25.486, requires a broker to disclose, before service begins or renews or materially changes, its registered name, its PUCT registration number, any affiliated retail electric provider, what the service is, how the broker is compensated and by whom, any termination process and cost, and the PUCT complaint contact. That’s a written disclosure. You should have a copy. If you don’t have a copy, you didn’t get the disclosure.
Why the folder wins
Here’s the practical payoff. When something goes wrong — a bill you don’t recognize, a switch you didn’t authorize, a charge that appeared — the first question anyone asks is “what does your contract say?” People who can answer that in thirty seconds get their problem solved. People who can’t spend three weeks reconstructing it while the clock runs.
The folder isn’t about being organized. It’s about being able to answer the question.
