A billing question

[voip123]

Today I got message - VOIPo Account Pending Disconnection. It stated I owed $0.65.

But I just checked VPanel, there is nothing under the Pending Charges.

I doubt the credit card company will accept a payment that is less than $1.00.

What is going on

Do you really want to disconnect the phone service only for $0.65. My AT&T won't do that. With AT&T, anything less than $1.00 will be automatically move to next month.

[VOIPoTim]

Our billing system automatically sends notices when a payment is declined regardless of the amount.

We want to be certain that anyone that has a failed payment has amble notification that a charge has failed. Often people ignore the e-mails and we've found the "Pending Disconnection" subject gets attention. Once we added that in, our delinquent accounts dropped drastically. Maybe the subject is a little dramatic, but we don't ever want someone to lose a phone number because they didn't read an e-mail that looked routine, so we need to go with something attention getting to make sure people are aware of declined charges since past due accounts are subject to disconnection.

Disconnections are handled manually several days after an account goes past due and there is some judgement used in regards to amounts and we wouldn't actually disconnect service for that small of an account.

Charges are listed in "Pending" until they are applied to an invoice. Once they are invoiced, they are no longer pending.

Charges under $1 do go through (we've processed thousands of them), but they are typically eaten up by the card processing charges so that's why many companies don't deal with them. We would do this to save on transactions fees too, but our billing system is not designed to do that and doesn't support it.

[VOIPoTim]

Also, some people have asked why they had a "negative" invoice. That means you had a credit on your account for something and when it was applied to the invoice, the was still credit left often. Those you can safely ignore and the remaining credit will be applied to future invoices.

If anyone has questions, please contact billing@voipo.com for assistance.

[MisterEd]

I doubt the credit card company will accept a payment that is less than $1.00.

They do. I've had payments taken from various credit cards for as little as 5cents.

The CC company will TAKE anything, it's the merchant who wants to avoid small amounts as the points they give back to the CC processor on every transaction is usually based on their average sale. Many retail merchants still set a minimum $ amount for credit card acceptance but that is usually in violation of their contract with the credit card processor especially at the B&M retail store level but of course customers rarely complain.