jamtronix

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about the non-bill that Telstra sends me every month. At the time, I assumed the reason for the $0.56 charge existing at all was that I had underpaid the final bill.

But the same thing has just started happening to Angela, who is now getting a $0.09 non-bill sent to her after also cancelling a service. And a closer inspection of the first non-bill shows that Telstra have charged a 9 cent fee for paying the previous bill by credit card.

This is actually the result of the RBA rulings that now allow merchants to explicitly pass on merchant service fees (and thus stop retailers having to raise prices for everybody to subsidise credit card loyalty programs). If you look at the fine print on the back of a Telstra bill, you'll see that paying by credit card incurs a small percentage fee, with different fees being charged depending on what credit card is used).

This fee can obviously only be calculated and charged after each bill has been paid. I.e. the charge for paying a bill this month will go on next month's bill. But what if there is no bill next month (because I've cancelled the service the bills were being sent for)? In that case, then Telstra will create a bill containing only the credit card payment fee, decide that it's too low a value to collect, and then send me a statement saying the balance will be carried over to the next month. Once that state is reached, there's no obvious way out - it seems like Telstra are going to spend a $1.00 or so every month telling us we owe them 9c, but not to pay it just yet.

As far as I can work out, this must happen every time someone cancels a Telstra service and then pays the last bill by credit card. In which case, there must be a heck of a lot of these non-bills getting sent each month.

That may explain why Telstra is so keen to revamp it's billing systems.