Why do bank statements end on *SUCH* wildly inconsistent days of the month?
Looking at your dates, I think I see a pattern.  It appears that your statement closing date is always 17 business days before the last business day of the month.  For example, if you start at May 31 and start counting backwards, skipping Saturdays, Sundays, and May 30 (Memorial Day), you'll see that May 5 is 17 business days before May 31.  I cannot explain why Bank of America would do this.  If you ask them, let us know what they say. If it bothers you, find another bank.  I do most of my banking (checking, savings, etc.) with a local credit union. Their statements end on the last day of the month, every month without fail. (Very nice, in my opinion.) I have two credit cards with nationally known banks, and although those statements end in the middle of the month, they are consistently on the same date every month. (One of them is on the 13th; the other date I can't recall right now.) You are right, a computer does the work, and your statement date should be able to fall on a weekend without trouble. Even when these were assembled by hand, the statement date could still be on a weekend, and they just wouldn't write it up until the following Monday.  You should be able to find another bank or credit union that does this. They need to spread the work for all customers over the whole month, and they don't work on weekends. Combine the two, and the rule becomes clear - if months have minimum of N working days, 1/N of all customers gets set on each day. You seem to be on day 5: If the month starts with a Monday, the fifth working day is the 5. (Friday); if there is a Sat or Sun in between, it will be the 6th, and if there is both a Sat and a Sun in there, it will be the 7th. However, the statement itself is not very important at all. It is just the day where they print it on paper (or even only on a PDF). You can see your bank account activity every day 24/7 by checking online, and nothing keeps you from printing it on every 1st of the month if you want (or every day, or whenever you prefer).
I was forced to give my bank permission to cover any overdrafts out of my savings accounts. Or pay the bank a fee.  After 6 months I discovered they were still taking out a fee, when I confronted them they said it wasn't the overdraft fee it was just an administrative fee.  Banks need to burn in hell. "I can't think of any conceivable circumstance in which the banker's advice would be true. (edit: Actually, yes I can, but things haven't worked that way since 1899 so his information is a little stale. Credit bureaus got their start by only reporting information about bad debtors.) The bureaus only store on your file what gets reported to them by the institution who extended you the credit. This reporting tends to happen at 30, 60 or 90-day intervals, depending on the contract the bureau has with that institution. All credit accounts are ""real"" from the day you open them. I suspect the banker might be under the misguided impression the account doesn't show up on your report (become ""real"") until you miss a payment, which forces the institution to report it, but this is incorrect-- the institution won't report it until the 30-day mark at the earliest, whether or not you miss a payment or pay it in full. The cynic in me suspects this banker might give customers such advice to sabotage their credit so he can sell them higher-interest loans. UDAAP laws were created for a reason." It's likely that your bill always shows the 24th as the due date. Their system is programmed to maintain that consistency regardless of the day of the week that falls on. When the 24th isn't a business day it is good to error on the side of caution and use the business day prior.  It would have accepted using their system with a CC payment on the 24th because that goes through their automated system. I would hazard a guess that because your payment was submitted through your bank and arrived on the 23rd it wasn't credited because a live person would have needed to be there to do it and their live people probably don't work weekends. I do much of my bill paying online and have found it easiest to just build a couple days of fluff into the schedule to avoid problems like this. That said, if you call them and explain the situation it is likely that they will credit the late charge back to you. "There's something wrong with your story. The IBAN contiains two check digits, and the method used to compute them guarantees that any single digit error will be caught. So it's impossible that ""HSBC screwed up the last digit of my IBAN"" because if that were the case, the resulting IBAN would not be valid and be rejected by the computer when it was entered at your bank." I think they're compounding the interest daily. That means you have to look at the number of days between payments to judge how much the interest charge is. From February 3 to March 2 is 28 days (2012 was a leap year). From March 2 to April 3 is 32 days. That's an increase of about 14% in number of days between payments, which accounts reasonably well to the ~$18 difference in interest charge.  Daily compounding also explains the minor fluctuations in the other interest charges. I think if you compute interest/day for each month, you'll find that it is, indeed, decreasing over time. It allows companies a time after which they can count the vouchers as part of profit in order to balance their books and also minimize internal fraud that could happen using the vouchers. If they didn't have an expiry date it becomes impossible to reconcile the voucher account as they can still possibly be used in future or may not be used. What do you count that as? If they have an expiry date, when the date passes you can count them as money coming in because they have been paid for though have not been used. I can think of a few good reasons: A company, especially public, usually wants their fourth-quarter earnings to be the strongest of the year. That ends each fiscal year on a high note for the company and its investors, which helps public sentiment and boosts stock prices. So, travel agencies and airlines usually like ending their year in October or March, in the lull between the summer and winter travel seasons with a large amount of that revenue falling within the company's fiscal Q4. Oil companies sometimes do the same because fuel prices are seasonal for much the same reasons. December is a really bad month to try to close out an entire year's accounting books. Accountants and execs are on vacation for large parts of the month, most retail stores are flooded with revenue (and then contra-revenue as items are returned) that takes time to account at the store level and then filter up to the corporate office, etc etc. It also doesn't tell the whole story for most retail outfits; December sales are usually inflated by purchases that are then returned in January after all the hullaballoo. As a result, a fiscal year end in January or even February keeps the entire season's revenues and expenses in one fiscal year. Your bank does not know about any SEPA Mandat you declare, until it gets in use. When the optionees withdraw money from your Account, they have to authenticate with the given Mandat and at this point your bank knows about that Mandat wich has an expiry date. According to the guidelines of the European Central Bank, your bank is not in duty to bookmark the expiration date. However, I'd assume they do anyway due they are allowed to and it makes things easier. Additional, if you can tell who the optionee is, you can block the withdraw before it happened. In any case, you have to call your bank. It is because 17th was Friday, 18th-19th were weekends and 20th was a holiday on the Toronto Stock Exchange (Family Day). Just to confirm you could have picked up another stock trading on TMX and observed the price movements. "But I have been having a little difficulty to include the expenditure in my monthly budget as the billing cycle is from the 16th to 15th of the next month and my income comes in at the end of the month. Many companies will let you change the statement date if you want, so one way to do this would be to request your bank to have statements due at the end of the month or first of month. You can call and ask, this might resolve your problem entirely. How can I efficiently add the credit card expenditure to my monthly budget? We do this using YNAB, which then means our monthly budget is separate from our actual bank accounts. When we spend, we enter the transaction into YNAB and it's ""spent."" Additionally, we just pay whatever our credit card balance is a day before the end of the month so it is at $0 when we do our budget discussion at the end of each month." "Debit Cards have a certain processing delay, ""lag time"", before the transaction from the vendor completes with your bank. In the US it's typically 3 business days but I have seen even a 15 day lag from Panera Bread. I guess in the UK, payment processors have similar processing delays. A business is not obliged to run its payment processing in realtime, as that's very expensive. Whatever be the lag time, your bank is supposed to cover the payment you promised through your card. Now if you don't have agreements in place (for example, overdraft) with your bank, they will likely have to turn down payments that exceed your available balance. Here is the raw deal: In the end, the responsibility to ensure that your available balance is enough is upon you (and whether you have agreements in place to handle such situations) So what happened is very much legal, a business is not obliged to run its payment processing in realtime and no ethics are at stake. To ensure such things do not happen to me, I used to use a sub-account from which my debit card used to get paid. I have since moved to credit cards as the hassle of not overdrawing was too much (and overdraft fees from banks in the US are disastrous, especially for people who actually need such a facility)" As far as I can see, this is an issue of the bank's policy rather than some legal regulation. That means that you'll need to work it out with the bank.  To give you a couple of ideas to work with when you talk with them, maybe something from this list will work: Good luck! Bank runs very complex software to detect suspicious activity - terrorism financing, money laundering, etc. How would a program know that some person's activity is suspicious? It uses a set of rules. That set might be imperfect (that likely was not intended) - there might be some rule that triggers a warning on your account dominating the fact you've been with them for 15 years. So it's highly likely that an imperfect program triggered a warning on your account and the bank employer didn't dismiss it. You're knowingly providing a payment method which has insufficient funds to meet the terms of the contract, because you are too lazy to comply with the contract. That's unethical and fraudulent behavior. Will you get in trouble? I don't know. I'd suggest getting acquainted with an electronic calendar that can remind you to do things. Oh yes, it is absolutely the problem of the consumers. After all how is the bank to know how it should be doing business unless the customer explains it to them?  Please read the other comments about how the customer has verified receipt of some critical document and then they claim that they don't have it. Sure they are very nice on the phone, but that doesn't help when I have to take time out of my work day to call them repeatedly.