New explanation in self serve about payment date

[computergeek541]

I looked at my account and noticed something relatively new.  I'm not sure exactly when this started, but under the payment due date near the top of the page, it now says "Pay your amount due by 11:59PM on this day in order for your plan cycle to re-start." 

This should help customers to understand when each plan period ends.

[computergeek541]

As it is now, the time zone doesn't make any difference since the renewal isn't done until hours later.  Public Mobile is the only carrier that I know of that does renewals so strangely.  

Most carriers do pre-authorized payments a few days ahead of time.  Some do it at a fixed amount on day of the month that you specify or 2 or 3 days before the due date.  The danger with this is that it's possible to have insufficent funds to pay for the billing cycle's plan fees due to overage fees at the other carriers. That also fails to take into account any balances left over in the account.

I do not have the answer as to have long it takes Public Mobile to process all Autopay requests on any given payment due date, but it should be possible to have autopay and plan renewal time to more closely coincide with midnight local time or 3am EST/EDT.  Carriers usually renew plans to the exact second each month/each billing period.  It seems like that it's just Public Mobile that's all over the place when it comes to timing.

[RobertQc]

At least they are trying to cause less confusion, but it takes public mobile a couple times to figure out how to do it properly 😉

[Anonymous]

Good noticing computergeek541. I agree with austinhuang and stonechucker that it should say ET as well.

There's also some other new text talking about one time payment. While they're probably trying to lessen the confusion, I wonder if some of this would actually create confusion.

[stonechucker]

Eastern Time is whatever the Eastern Time Zone 'observes' throughout the year.

Eastern Standard Time is UTC-5.

Eastern Daylight Time is UTC-4.

That's an hour difference.  For those who don't observe daylight time, it's an important distinction.  Don't get me started on automated systems... lol

[smp99]

Maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe they start the accounting process after 3am Eastern time. That way all time zones in Cda will be past midnight.

[stonechucker]

They should state it as Eastern Time, that way you know for sure, as Standard and Daylight times are always messed up around here.

This last time change went much better than the previous time changes 🙂

[austinhuang]

11:59 PM what time? Guess they'll have to say it's EST (PM self-serve works in EST).