SMS Overview, Insights & Billing Log mismatch?

When sending your SMS, you will be able to find an Overview of all the SMS sent and received through the MessageBird Dashboard.

Here, if you find that the number of messages reflecting on the Overview page does not match the number of SMS sent as found on your SMS Insights page or on your Billing page, don't fret!

Looking at the side-by-side comparison below, you'll see that the message on the SMS Overview page looks to be one, long message. However, the Insights page says that we just sent 5 messages altogether. It might seem that there is a mismatch in terms of how many SMS you've been billed for, but this is not the case.

SMS Overview (1 Message)

SMS Insights (5 SMS)

Billing Log (5 SMS)

How can this be?

On our platform, you can send a single message that contains a maximum of 1377 standard (GSM) characters or 603 Unicode characters.

One SMS contains a maximum of 160 characters. If you send more than 160 characters, MessageBird will calculate how many characters are within your message and you will be charged accordingly.

We will 'see' the message as one long, connected message but the number of SMS itself within the message will differ depending on the character count. Because of this, you may find discrepancies in the Insights & Billing versus the Overview page.

You can check our article on How Long An SMS Can Be to understand how many messages you are sending depending on your character count.

If you are sure that there is indeed a mismatch with the statistics that is unrelated to long messages, please reach out to support@messagebird with the following information:

• Specific timeframe where you saw the mismatch

• The links on where you found this issue

• If possible, screenshots of the mismatch in SMS number tally showing the same