“Business day” and “due date” for bills
I don't believe Saturday is a business day either. When I deposit a check at a bank's drive-in after 4pm Friday, the receipt tells me it will credit as if I deposited on Monday.  If a business' computer doesn't adjust their billing to have a weekday due date, they are supposed to accept the payment on the next business day, else, as you discovered, a Sunday due date is really the prior Friday. In which case they may be running afoul of the rules that require X number of days from the time they mail a bill to the time it's due.  The flip side to all of this, is to pick and choose your battles in life. Just pay the bill 2 days early. The interest on a few hundred dollars is a few cents per week. You save that by not using a stamp, just charge it on their site on the Friday. Keep in mind, you can be right, but their computer still dings you. So you call and spend your valuable time when ever the due date is over a weekend, getting an agent to reverse the late fee. The cost of 'right' is wasting ten minutes, which is worth far more than just avoiding the issue altogether.  But - if you are in the US (you didn't give your country), we have regulations for everything. HR 627, aka The CARD act of 2009, offers - ‘‘(2) WEEKEND OR HOLIDAY DUE DATES.—If the payment due date for a   credit card account under an open end consumer credit plan is a day on   which the creditor does not receive or accept payments by mail   (including weekends and holidays), the creditor may not treat a   payment received on the next business day as late for any purpose.’’. So, if you really want to pursue this, you have the power of our illustrious congress on your side. You definitely have an argument for getting them to reverse the late fee, especially if it hasn't happened very often. (If you are late every month they may be less likely to forgive.) As for why this happens, it's not actually about business days, but instead it's based on when they know that you paid. In general, there are 2 ways for a company to mark a bill as paid: Late Fees: Some systems automatically assign late fees at the start of the day after the due date if money has not been received. In your case, if your bill was due on the 24th, the late fee was probably assessed at midnight of the 25th, and the payment arrived after that during the day of the 25th. You may have been able to initiate the payment on the company's website at 11:59pm on the 24th and not have received a late fee (or whatever their cutoff time is). Suggestion: as a rule of thumb, for utility bills whose due date and amount can vary slightly from month to month, you're usually better off setting up your payments on the company website to pull from your bank account, instead of setting up your bank account to push the payment to the company. This will ensure that you always get the bill paid on time and for the correct amount. If you still would rather push the payment from your bank account, then consider setting up the payment to arrive about 5 days early, to account for holidays and weekends. 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.
You will need to buy a stock before the ex-dividend date to receive the dividends. You can sell a stock on the ex-dividend date or after and you will receive the dividends. So if the ex-dividend date is the 5th August, you need to buy before the 5th and you can sell on the 5th or after, to receive the dividends. Definitions from the ASX: Record date The Record Date is 5.00pm on the date a company closes its share   register to determine which shareholders are entitled to receive   the current dividend.  It is the date where all changes to   registration details must be finalised.   Ex dividend date The ex dividend date occurs two business days before the company's   Record Date. To be entitled to a dividend a shareholder must have   purchased the shares before the ex dividend date. If you purchase   shares on or after that date, the previous owner of the shares (and   not you) is entitled to the dividend. A company's share price may move up as the ex dividend date approaches   and then fall after the ex dividend date. If the rate is the same, then clearing one card to zero does have one advantage: getting your grace period back. Generally when you owe money on your credit card, and you make a new purchase that new purchase get charged interest starting on day one. But if you are not carrying  a balance, in other words you pay off the charges every month, then new purchases aren't charged until you fail to pay the balance by the due date. That grace period can be 25 to 55 days depending where you are in the billing cycle. Having one clean card will allow you to use that card when you have no other choice. Lets say you have an emergency car repair while away from home. You don't have $500 in cash so you put it on the clean card. When you get home you know that you can pay the bill and not have been charged interest. "According to Wikipedia, Treasury bills mature in 1 year or less to a fixed face value: Treasury bills (or T-Bills) mature in one year or less. Regular weekly T-Bills are commonly issued with maturity dates of 28 days (or 4 weeks, about a month), 91 days (or 13 weeks, about 3 months), 182 days (or 26 weeks, about 6 months), and 364 days (or 52 weeks, about 1 year). Treasury bills are sold by single-price auctions held weekly. The T-bills (as Wikipedia says, like zero-coupon bonds) are actually sold at a discount to their face value and mature to their face value. They do not return any interest before the date of maturity.  Because the amount earned is fixed at purchase, ""return"" is a more accurate term than ""rate"" when referring to a specific T-bill. The ""rate"" is the difference between this return and the discount value you purchased it at. So, yes, your rate of return is guaranteed. T-notes (1-10 year) and T-bonds (20-30 year) also have an interest rate guaranteed, but have coupon payments (usually every 6 months), paying out a fixed amount of interest on the principal.  (See more info on the same Wikipedia page.) Because those bonds are not compounding the interest it pays out, but instead paying out every 6 months, you'd have to purchase new securities to create a compound return, changing your rate of return over time slightly as the rates for new treasury securities changes." All standard mortgage promissory notes mandate payments are due on the first of every month; I can almost guarantee the note you signed has this provision.  Most lenders offer a grace period of generally 15 days before they assess a late charge, but the payment IS late on the 2nd.  People have become incorrectly accustomed to believe that the payment is due between the 1st and 15th. If they are servicing your loan for another investor (FNMA, FHMLC, a private investor, etc.), they may have contractual requirements to begin collection activities by a certain date. So they are within the rights you granted them.  If these calls really bug you, you can start to adjust your cashflow so you can perhaps make your payment a few days ahead of the first each month. The NYSE holidays are listed online here: https://www.nyse.com/markets/hours-calendars You can do this through a journal entry in Quickbooks.  It can all be entered as one entry, there's no need to do separate ones for each bill. The journal entry should debit Accounts Payable and credit your equity account.  In the line for Accounts Payable, make sure to choose your name in the 'Name' column.  This, in effect, enters a credit to your account, which will offset the bills that were shown there previously. The last step is to apply those credits to the bills.  Even though they offset each other, your name would still show up in any Payables reports and in the Pay Bills window.  To do this, open the Pay Bills window and select one of the bills owed to you.  There should be an option to choose 'Apply Credits' or something similar (depends on which version of Quickbooks you are running).  Choose that option, and apply credits in the amount of the bill, so that it zeroes out.  Do the same for all of the other bills.  Once they are all checked off, click the button to Pay Bills.  This won't actually 'pay' anything, but will instead just apply the credits to the bills as indicated. While I'm not an accountant, this is how I do this for my personal   accounting: Note, if you don't want the expense to take effect right away meaning   it'll affect your Profits, then the transaction date here needs to be   something in the future, then when you hit that date and the bill is   still not paid, you just unpost the bill and repost again with a new   date . So you end up with something like the following:   4. Now you post the invoice to Liabilities:Accounts Payable:The Cable Company, the invoice due date should reflect what you had in the invoice. This is important as gnucash will warn you that your bill is due if you want to pay it every time it starts:  When you're ready to pay the bill, just find the bill and click pay invoice. If it's already paid and you imported transactions from your bank, find the transaction then right click and click assign as payment then choose your invoice. Note: I've being using this to also record cheques that are given to   people but not cashed yet. I hope that helps. "We have a local bank that changed to a bill pay service.  The money is held as ""processing"" when the check is supposed to be cut and shows as cleared on the date the check is supposed to be received.  Because our business checking is with the same bank, we discovered recently that the although the check shows cleared from our account, the recipient has not received the paper check yet - and may not for 2-3 days.  We discovered this because the payroll checks we write this way (to ourselves) never arrive on the due date but clear the business account.  It appears to be a new way for banks to ride the ""float"" and draw interest on the money.  It happens with every check processed through the bill pay system and not with electronic transfers."