Options for different bill cycles?

My energy bill seems to be on a 30-day cycle instead of ending on a specific date each month. Would anyone else benefit from more bill cycle options? Is this something Sense can add in a future release?

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Thread moved to product wishlist forum.

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Our cycles here are almost never the same two months in a row. It seems to be when our power company gets around to driving their little trucks past our homes to get a meter reading. Some bills are 30 days, some 29, some 32… it’s all over the place. :man_shrugging:t3:

PG&E, or another utility ?

Yes, actually, same here. Except we have smart meters so no one has to come read it in person. I’m sure BGE has a formula for determining bill cycles, but I haven’t bothered figuring it out.

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PSE&G in NJ is equally weird, here’s the number of days between bill cycles in the past 12 months,

32, 30, 32, 29, 29, 29, 33, 34, 28, 30, 29

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Guess where I live here in Kentucky we are slow enough that formulas are too difficult. Read date is always first of the month. Guess that’s why Sense predictions for my bill are always so close

My cycle is on whenever the Utility Company (Centerpoint Energy) feels like sending the meter readings to my provider (Greenmountain Energy) and I end up with something like @perze.ababa mentioned above.

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I have the same issue with Duke Energy, 32 days this period, 30 last and so on. I start and end date would be nice or start date with number of days in billing cycle.

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+1, XCel does the same thing with our bills, changing the exact dates every month

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Our Utility, Alameda Municipal, also bills on a 30-day cycle. Does make it confusing when my wife asks for the December bill, “which one?” I have to change the billing date every month that doesn’t have 30 days in it to keep everything straight. But this is such a step up from the Black and Decker Whole House Power Monitor I used before.

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We have the same problem with National Grid in MA. Sense could easily add a start/end date for a monthly report to their web site. This is a CRITICAL and easy feature to implement. Please do it Sense!

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Make sure to hit the “heart” on the initial post, I understand this is how Sense tracks the demand for each feature requested

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Similar to others that have replied here, my utility has a variable bill cycle as well. The number of service days varies from 28 to 33 days. It almost never coincides with the number of days in the month. It would be great if you could specify the end date for each individual bill.

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I’m in upstate NY and are similar as everyone else, but lets take it a step further and make it also able to change the cost of electricity, it changes as the market does.

This is such an easy feature to implement (adding start/end date to the reports) and Sense has done zero about it. I’m a software dev. Spend a few days on it. If anything it’s 100% doable unlike the device detection.

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From those requesting this, I’d like to know a bit more. What would be your use case? At the conclusion of every billing cycle, you’d change the dates in the Sense app so they’d exactly reflect your bill?

Ideally, where would you want to adjust these dates? In Settings, where they are currently? Directly on the Trends screen (that’d likely make things quite crowded on mobile)?

@omsrobert You mention “reports.” Are you referring to the Monthly Email Report here? Or just the Billing Cycle tab presented on the Trends screen?

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I’m fortunate enough to not have to bother with TOU and bill cycle calculus (partly out of laziness) but this is may take on use case vs development effort:

  • The data export function, with some Excel magic or R-crafting (thank you @kevin1) offers many more permutations that would ever be rationally included in the UI.

  • Most people are not going to bother with the above and just want a “simple” report or cost tracking.

  • “Simplification” can come by adding some complexity (and potential confusion) to the UI.

  • “Simplification” could also come by putting that dev effort into the export function.

  • The export function could have a “Report generation” aspect and be user-initiated.

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My bill cycle is so random I’d just like to be able to go back in history and manually tell Sense the start/end of each cycle so I can align the usage.

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My 2c - this is just another way at getting the Sense Usage UI display to line up with a varying monthly billing cycle. The thought would be that there would be a Custom Period tab selector in the Usage screen, that when you clicked it, would allow you to enter start and end dates.

A custom time period might also be useful for lots of other users as well.

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