So as not to come off as too unreasonable or difficult on Twitter, a longer explanation of recent tweets is likely helpful.
I tweeted this to Rogers, one of Canada’s big telecom companies:
https://twitter.com/neilmcintyre/status/667060548908032000
Every month, I’m billed for my mobile phone service and cable TV on the 11th. Rogers bills in advance of the services being performed, but that’s a subject for another day.
The problem is, I usually don’t have access to the bill until much, much later. When it’s available, I get a notification email.
I started to wonder whether this is a process issue with invoicing (i.e. producing a complete and accurate invoice), or perhaps an interface issue between their usage tracking system(s) and the customer-facing, web-based system. If I had to guess, I would think it’s probably the latter.
But it raises the question as to whether it’s appropriate to backdate the invoice when it’s clearly not created on the invoice date. The question becomes more pertinent when the customer is a business with payment terms based on the invoice date, but that’s not relevant here. (That does cause me to wonder whether it would be beneficial for B2C companies to offer their customers payment terms, but I’m guessing someone already ran the numbers on this.)
Thinking about cutoff, their revenue recognition would be based on when the services are rendered and the amounts are earned, so that takes us back to the fact that they’re billing in advance of those services, and thus that should be accounted for properly, irrespective of invoice dates.
In any case, on November 21 I received notification via email that my invoice was available online. Of course, it was dated November 11.
Update 2015/12/18: December’s bill, dated the 11th, arrived today (a bit earlier!)