New dev team needed

[#1]

Quote from: Ben

As has been discussed in numerous threads, we can't change a Direct Debit date because our system was never built with this functionality in mind. In order to allow this we'd need to rip out the whole billing system and rebuilt it from the ground up. Whilst there may be proponents of that approach, we don't have the resource available in our Development Team to do this.

What DO the development team actually do? It seems that it needs a total overhaul so that they can re-work the insanely slow portal and the archaic billing system.
It'd be nice to see a dev team blog to see what is being worked on currently, what idea's they like implement but don't know if there would be enough customer support to make them worthwhile, and maybe even crowdsourcing for help and support from the PN community.

[#2]

Quote from: avatastic

What DO the development team actually do?

Well as the date for the DD to happen is a problem for YOU and not for PN, it will not be high on the priority of things to do for PN.

[#3]

We did used to have the development teams (and other teams) posting an end of day or end of week a year or so back, but there were very few readers of those so it was stopped. I'll ask about and see if we could put something like that back in but it would depend on interest from the community, plus we can't really go into a lot of detail simply because anything new in development is generally commercially sensitive. We do announce rollouts on the service status pages and posts in the announcements forum, too.
I can assure you though that they are most definitely busy, in fact it's frequently the development team we head to to get answers for many of the questions asked on these forums.

[#4]

Why not give a choice of 3 or 4 dates in a month when a customer first opens an account, works for the likes of  council tax and others in my area at least the customer will be able to choose a reasonably suitable date.
Couldn't be too difficult to set up .......................could it  
Perhaps wouldn't be of help to existing customers but would certainly help new customers

[#5]

Quote

Couldn't be too difficult to set up .......................could it

A lot harder than you might think, but it's a really nice idea. I will suggest it all the same.
Adam.

[#6]

I can see problems with choosing the date as I suspect a significant majority would be picking the very end of the month/beginning of the month around the time they are paid. At the moment I'd guess billing dates are pretty evenly distributed throughout the month.
This would have two impacts:
1. Cashflow
2. Processing. Not only is there the billing itself, but also the resetting of usage etc. If you check the times the bandwidth reset ticket gets added to your account you'll see that it takes quite a time at present. Processing a similar number of accounts each day has obvious advantages.

[#7]

I never gave the issues round the usage monitors a thought tbh,  but whilst a lot get paid round about the end/beginning of the month a lot in the financial industry's get paid about the middle of the month deliberately to help the bacs system cope.
Perhaps the possibility of offering either the set up date or one specific date say the 17th  could be looked at.
Anyway it was just a thought