Historic invoice costs with spark

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richms

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#323326 18-Nov-2025 16:42

If someone had a spark account, and had their invoices sent to that, and subsequently lost those emails and they are now well over 18 months ago, what is the process and costs to get spark to regenerate the invoices and send them to a new email account?

Just need the cost they charge per invoice at this point to work out if its worth proceeding with, so I assume someone here may have interacted with them on this issue recently.

https://www.spark.co.nz/business/help/billing/request-a-copy.html just says that there will be a charge for it and I cant find an equivilant on the https://www.spark.co.nz/help/account/bill/find-my-bill/ page.

Richard rich.ms

TehFlak

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#3435819 18-Nov-2025 21:33

Hey, maybe some out of date info :

I ended my two years as a lowly sales rep in Jan this year. I was based instore, if someone came in and asked for a bill/invoice, we could search in our CRM as far back until the current system was migrated, which was more than 5 years ago at this point.

In my store, there wasn't much of a process, load and verify the customer and account, from there we can search the above bills/statements, and had the option to view it as a .PDF, to resend it to the email/input a new one, or to mail it at a cost. No need to regenerate it.

In terms of emailing, I 100 percent remember there being no charge to resend it, or at least, I never charged anyone lol. Take all of this with a grain of salt though, 10 months is a long time.

MichaelNZ

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#3436434 21-Nov-2025 17:48

Logging into the Spark customer portal I could go back a year for our mobile bills.

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snnet

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#3449596 4-Jan-2026 13:17

A while back I needed one copy for my end of financial year and I think I got charged $5 +GST for it to be e-mailed to me. I had since done this once more maybe 2 years later and didn't get billed for it, so... free or something like $5 + GST

kiwiharry

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#3449600 4-Jan-2026 13:43

From https://www.spark.co.nz/online/help/forms/copy-of-bill-request

There is a fee of $5.11 including GST for each month requested.

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geek3001

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#3449606 4-Jan-2026 14:12

kiwiharry:

From https://www.spark.co.nz/online/help/forms/copy-of-bill-request

There is a fee of $5.11 including GST for each month requested.

Spark is one of the few creditors, if not the only one, that I deal with that does not include their monthly bill as a PDF attachment on the monthly notification email. I need to click a link on the email to retrieve the invoice from their server.

The link on the email to the server is only valid for sixty days, and you can only access the invoice via your logon for eighteen months. After that if you want a copy you have to ask and pay for it.

Spark should put the invoice on the email, where it is smaller than say a few MB and have larger file size invoices up on their server. That way in most cases we can just refer back to the email in our email archive to get the invoice in the future if required.

davidcole

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#3449612 4-Jan-2026 14:52

geek3001:

kiwiharry:

From https://www.spark.co.nz/online/help/forms/copy-of-bill-request

There is a fee of $5.11 including GST for each month requested.

Spark is one of the few creditors, if not the only one, that I deal with that does not include their monthly bill as a PDF attachment on the monthly notification email. I need to click a link on the email to retrieve the invoice from their server.

The link on the email to the server is only valid for sixty days, and you can only access the invoice via your logon for eighteen months. After that if you want a copy you have to ask and pay for it.

Spark should put the invoice on the email, where it is smaller than say a few MB and have larger file size invoices up on their server. That way in most cases we can just refer back to the email in our email archive to get the invoice in the future if required.

2degrees do this as well. I complained and said there’s nothing sensitive in these bills (I work in this industry sending on behalf of others). So send as pdf. They agreed and this past month I received a pdf instead of the usual link to their site. Which used to do my head in.

Rude spark charge you so much considering the pdfs are all just sitting there in a repository.

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geek3001

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#3449615 4-Jan-2026 14:59

davidcole:

Rude spark charge you so much considering the pdfs are all just sitting there in a repository.

In which case one could argue their fee is invalid, and Spark should simply remove the eighteen month restricted availability via one's account logon, and simply make the invoice available for the mandated retention period (at least seven years?) via that logon.

davidcole

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#3449634 4-Jan-2026 15:46

geek3001:

davidcole:

Rude spark charge you so much considering the pdfs are all just sitting there in a repository.

In which case one could argue their fee is invalid, and Spark should simply remove the eighteen month restricted availability via one's account logon, and simply make the invoice available for the mandated retention period (at least seven years?) via that logon.

I don’t know what their retention policy is. A statement is probably 200-400kb per pdf when stored individually. Which is a really inefficient way to do it due to resource duplication.

geek3001

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#3449641 4-Jan-2026 16:10

I just accessed my Dec 2025 invoice via the link on the invoice.

The PDF metadata shows that the PDF was created on 01 Dec 2025, which suggests that the PDF is being stored on the server for the sixty days they say it's there.

They could potentially retain online access to the invoices for up to seven years, if they instead ran a routine that created the invoice on the fly from their billing database, which should save duplication and storage.

davidcole

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#3449644 4-Jan-2026 16:14

geek3001:

I just accessed my Dec 2025 invoice via the link on the invoice.

The PDF metadata shows that the PDF was created on 01 Dec 2025, which suggests that the PDF is being stored on the server for the sixty days they say it's there.

They could potentially retain online access to the invoices for up to seven years, if they instead ran a routine that created the invoice on the fly from their billing database, which should save duplication and storage.

yeah they store at generation time. You wouldn’t recreate it each time…you could but horribly inefficient.

then it’s a matter of how long they store for. Which could by just the 60 days

quickymart

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#3449662 4-Jan-2026 17:06

From my time at Spark, the maximum they could obtain back to was up to 7 years, not sure if that's still the case or not.

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richms

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#3449709 4-Jan-2026 19:22

The problem with them regenerating the invoice to show it to you it that it is then a new copy of the document, its not the same document.

That is why IMO all invoices should be mandated to be sent to you as a PDF email, no links to portals where you have to put work in to get the document downloaded and worry about saving it. Bonus would be if they were told they had to digitally sign them as well.

Richard rich.ms