Time Zones in Billing: Why Getting This Wrong Costs Real Money
Blog post from Lago
Time zones remain essential for global products, particularly billing systems where differences between a provider’s and customer’s local time can create confusion over usage, subscription boundaries, invoice timing, and prepaid-credit expiration. Lago’s approach stores all timestamps in UTC using ISO 8601 for consistency and converts them to the relevant customer-facing time zone only when displayed, avoiding the complexity of storing varying local times. The company highlights risks when customers change time zones mid-billing cycle, which can cause consumption to be charged twice or omitted unless billing-period boundaries are realigned. Its implementation treats dates as time-zone-dependent, preserves customer-local accounting dates on invoices, runs automated billing checks hourly rather than daily, and uses safeguards against duplicate charges. Lago defaults to UTC but allows organization-level and individual-customer time-zone settings, applying the chosen customer time zone throughout usage ingestion, expiry processing, and invoicing.
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