Pro-rated charges question...

[turningwolf]

I feel like I should understand this...:frustrate

The AS rep who helped me switch plans a couple of days ago suggested that I should let the current billing cycle complete before allowing the new plan to take effect, thus avoiding a much higher-than-necessary next bill. I don't quite understand why that should be...shouldn't I just get charged for whatever portion of the month that I was on the old plan, the portion of the month that i was switched to the new plan, and for the new month on the new plan? Why would my next bill be a lot more than what it "should" be?

[Noodle]

Wirelessly posted (Noodle's Phone: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows CE; IEMobile 7.11) Sprint:PPC6800)

I had this same issue. I switched plans the day before my minutes restart. my next bill though was for jan to feb plus feb to march

[SUPqueue]

Your bill wouldn't be "alot" higher than a normal bill unless you were switching to a much higher plan but it would look very confusing. I'll try to give you an example: Lets assume you are on a Power Pack 450 Individual ($39.99) and you are switching to a Simply Everything ($99.99) and you are half way through your cycle.

If you do the plan change for today you will receive a credit for half of your $39.99 on your next bill ($20) and a charge for half of the $99.99 ($50)..... Those are to correct what you were charged on your last bill for the current cycle. You would then have a month in advance charge of $99.99 for your next cycle. As a result yur bill would be $50-$20=$30 more than a normal bill.

One of the main call drivers in the Sprint billing department is proration and it is very difficult to explain so I'm sure agents are making every attempt to avoid causing you more confusion than necessary.

[StarmanDX]

The main issue is switching plans towards the beginning of a cycle if you have a high minutes used count, as the proration divides the number of minutes in your old plan by the number of days that it was active, then charges you overage rates for any minutes you used over that amount.

Proration is generally something to be avoided, unless you know you are well below the invisible threshold of allowed daily minute usage.

[jonesle7]

I just got my new bill and I switched plans during the past month. My bill was definitely wrong. Maybe this is why some representatives suggest or force you to wait for the change until the next billing cycle.

[turningwolf]

I just got my new bill and I switched plans during the past month. My bill was definitely wrong. Maybe this is why some representatives suggest or force you to wait for the change until the next billing cycle.

Have you called them? What's their response?

[jonesle7]

I called and the representative agreed that there were errors in the bill and they gave me a credit to correct the errors. I had to explain it several times before the representative understood the errors but eventually the representative figured it out.

[Bibbin]

I think that whenever a customer makes a change to their plan(s) Sprint should automatically wait until the customers next billing cycle to impement those changes and their associated charges. Prorations are the biggest systematic rip-off and should be avoided at all costs. In addition, when you combine prorations with the infamous month in advance, you have total chaos visually on your bill.

An example of the proration rip-off is this admitted error on one of my recent bills. I added a plan wihch costs $30 (you know the one:D). Now, I made it a point to not add this line until the first day of my billing cycle. By some odd occurence, the bill reflected that the line was added on the last day of the proir cycle, resulting in a one-day proration. How much was that proration charge for one day you ask? $7.00. Yes, $7.00 for one day on a $30.00 plan. Go figure. Called billing and their explanation - system fluke. ok:hee:

[SUPqueue]

The main issue is switching plans towards the beginning of a cycle if you have a high minutes used count, as the proration divides the number of minutes in your old plan by the number of days that it was active, then charges you overage rates for any minutes you used over that amount.

Proration is generally something to be avoided, unless you know you are well below the invisible threshold of allowed daily minute usage.

Actually this is not the case since R8 of the Unified Billing Platform in November of 2008. When you do a mid cycle plan change minutes are not prorated any longer. You are actually given the full bucket of each plan for the part of the month you were on the plan.

On the issue of suggesting or forcing plan changes to the beginning of the next cycle: agents are actually instructed to do this except in cases where a plan change will prevent overage or casual charges ..... The problem being that these plan changes that save people money by doing it in mid cycle are usually not recognized as such because the sprint customer never sees the overage that would have occurred had the plan change not occurred.


There are sometimes issues with proration but they are generally due to human error as opposed to system error..... although sprint agents are not supposed to be human and make mistakes.