Meaning & use
cycle billing
Last updated
Meaning
noununcountablebusiness
A way of sending customers their bills in groups on different days of the month, rather than all at once on the same day.
Grammar: Usually has no plural or article: the utility switched to cycle billing.
Patterns
- switch to cycle billing
- be on cycle billing
The phone company moved to cycle billing so that its call center would not be flooded on the first of the month.
Under cycle billing, my statement arrives on the 12th, while my neighbor's comes on the 27th.
Cycle billing spreads the accounting workload evenly across the whole month.
Common combinations
- switch to cycle billing
- The water board will switch to cycle billing next year.
- cycle billing date
- Your cycle billing date is printed at the top of every statement.
- cycle billing system
- A cycle billing system needs careful records of each customer's group.
- use cycle billing
- Most credit card issuers use cycle billing.
- cycle billing period
- Charges made after the cycle billing period closes appear on the next statement.
Synonyms and how they differ
- staggered billing
- This is a plain-language way to describe the same idea, but it is less of an official term and is rarely used in contracts.
- periodic billing
- It only says that bills come at regular intervals and does not suggest that customers are split into groups with different dates.
- monthly billing
- Monthly billing says how often you are billed, whereas cycle billing says that the billing dates differ between customers.
Opposites
Word family
Commonly confused: cycle billing or billing cycle?
cycle billing vs billing cycle
A billing cycle is the time span covered by one statement. Cycle billing is the whole practice of splitting customers across several such cycles.
Practice
A utility company sends 30,000 customers their statements on different days of the month so that payments arrive evenly. This practice is called ___.
Choose one answer.
Cycle billing means dividing customers into groups with different billing dates. Direct debit is a payment method, which is a tempting wrong answer, but it says nothing about when bills are issued.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “cycle billing”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.