How Billing Errors Cost You Money

Billing errors are very common in this computerized world now. Every company will send out thousands of bills and some of them will have errors on them. Most of the errors are overcharges or a charge that should have been taken off but hasn't been. While these can easily be corrected, it is very important to check your bills every month for these errors, if left uncheck and you pay the bills it will be harder to get these charges removed.

If you are paying your bills online or automated you may not get a paper statement anymore, instead you will have to log into your account online and see an electronic copy of your bill. This should be done every time you get a notice about your bill. Look over the charges and make sure that each charge that you are being charged for is legitimate. This is especially true if you had called the customer service department in the company and made any changes on your account or requested to downgrade service. Sometimes the computer systems don't do as expected and don't remove charges or the customer service agent made an error and it didn't go through the system correctly. If you spoke to someone in customer service to make a change always make notes of who you spoke to and what date. This will save you allot of problems if you have to call back.

If you are charged more than you think you should have been call the company and ask for an explanation, sometimes they will credit you one month if the charge wasn't explained to you properly. They are aware that they have many customer service agents working for them and while they are expected to give out the same information sometimes they don't.

If you disconnect service or move your service to a new location always look over the final bills. While most places will stop billing on the date you requested sometimes the computer program will bill for the full month and you will have to call back and have them remove the charges for the days you weren't there.

Credit card statements are very important to look over every month, you may have your interest rate increase because your payment wasn't processed in time and this could affect you for many months or years in the future.

This is your money that you are dealing with make sure that before you pay that bill that everything is correct. It's easier to get it corrected before you pay it then after you pay it. Checking your statements every month can save you money.