true up
n.— «Each December, PG&E looks at the costs associated with delivering power to roughly 15 million Californians. In a process called the “true up,” the utility’s executives study their costs to buy electricity from power plants, maintain their electricity distribution network and hook up new customers, among other things. Then they determine what the next year’s rates will be, based on rate structures that state regulators already have approved.» —“Tiny drop in power bills for PG&E residential customers” by David R. Baker San Francisco Chronicle (California) Dec. 27, 2007. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
Enthusiastic book recommendations! Martha’s savoring the biography of Alexander von Humboldt, the 19th-century explorer, polymath, and naturalist who revolutionized our understanding of nature and predicted the effects of human activity on...
“True up” is accounting slang meaning “to adjust a figure to its true value.” The adjustment may be either up or down, and typical causes include an estimate becomming outdated (similar to the PG&E;example) or end-of-period error corrections. I’ve heard the verb form more often than the noun, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen it in print before.