Customer-month billing rows

Table grain states what one row represents, and customer-month grain means the unit is one bill: one customer, one month, one set of charge fields. The cataloged example comes from the Hugging Face Datasets - Utilities Search record, whose coverage.granularity lists "customer-month billing rows" among row-level records across 75 public datasets, tagged 'billing'.

The temporal note anchors the sample window: "Billing sample rows observed for 2024-06 through 2024-12", seven months of billing activity. In the same result set those tables sit beside smart-meter readings, outage logs and grid-load series from the electricsheepafrica Nigerian energy collection, most repos shipping CSV plus snappy-compressed Parquet with README-stated row counts between 60k and 220k.

Grain determines which questions a table can answer without reshaping. Monthly customer rows support churn, arrears and tariff-impact analysis directly; daily meter readings answer load questions but not billing ones.

• Seven months limits cohort studies. Sample rows cover 2024-06 through 2024-12, too short for annual seasonality - check any vendor's window before promising year-over-year comparisons.
• Synthetic provenance must be disclosed. The cataloged review flags several collections as engineered or synthetic; billing patterns trained on such data inherit its assumptions.
• License clarity lags availability. The electricsheepafrica repos carry a non-standard 'other' licence tag whose commercial grant is not clearly stated - treat redistribution as unresolved.

1. State the grain explicitly in any contract. "Customer-month billing rows" is the documented phrase - require suppliers to describe grain this concretely before purchase.

1. Verify the temporal window. Observed billing samples span seven months (2024-06 to 2024-12); ask whether production feeds extend beyond it.

1. Check row counts against claims. Repos publish README row counts of roughly 60k-220k rows; reconcile against delivered files before building dashboards.

1. Inspect schema documentation. Each electricsheepafrica repo ships an explicit schema table - missing schemas elsewhere signal undocumented grains.

1. Resolve licensing before deployment. 'license:other' tags leave commercial rights unclear; get written terms or pick differently licensed sources.

Entries that sit next to Customer-month billing rows in this glossary:

• disco-nigeria-distribution-companies