Why do you need the bill due date?

[suzannehillman]

It seems a little odd a thing to be asking people to give you. What do you use it for? Can people put in something approximate? Is it required for some reason? If not, can it be made visible that it's optional?

It's be better if people knew why you were asking. The number of people and the electricity used make sense, given that you're comparing with other people in Cambridge. The due date seems very out of place, and may make people pause and/or be unwilling to provide it or even submit anything.

[kvotolato3]

The answer has two parts. First, this field is slightly mislabeled. It should simply be called Bill Date, as in the date that is printed on the customer's bill (not the date the bill is due). Second, we need the date so we can calculate usage statistics and compare them to other users.

Another thing that may not be clear is that the user needs to have their monthly bill open (whether it be on paper, pdf, or open in a web portal) in front of them when they enter a bill manually. The data points we ask for (Date, Usage in Kwh) are readily available on the bill. That being said we definitely intend to implement an automatic data feed from the energy provider to our site (with customer permission of course), but it is still in the works for a while. In the meantime, users can test the site by entering bills manually or by uploading their "Download My Data" XML file, which they can also download from Eversource, the energy provider here in Cambridge.

[suzannehillman]

Fixing the label is definitely useful, yes, and makes the request make a bit more sense. I'm not sure if that's sufficient, but I'd expect that it'll at least be less confusing.

I just noticed that there's no help; not even hover text explaining things. It might be a useful thing to add, so that we can communicate why we need the info we need.