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Since this is related, what do you guys use for personal finance tracking? I used Microsoft Money for a long time, but they don't release new versions of that anymore. Would Microsoft Access be an overkill? What do you guys use?

Since this is related, what do you guys use for personal finance tracking? I used Microsoft Money for a long time, but they don't release new versions of that anymore. Would Microsoft Access be an overkill? What do you guys use?

I use Paytrust. I have all of my bills sent to them, and they scan them in and pay them automatically based on payment rules I set. I can categorize each bill and generate reports from that, which is good enough to let me separate my investment property rental expenses from the rest of my personal expenses at tax time. At the end of the year I can buy a CD with my annual activity archived.

For investment tracking, I rely on E*Trade.

This system works for me and I'm not sure what I'd gain from something like MS Money, I don't need to track anything down to the last penny, I don't even balance my checkbook.

Sorry, bad link in my post - it should link to: Paytrust. I dropped the "http" in the link, and apparently that makes it link to this article.

http://www.paytrust.com/

Most of my bills are transmitted electronically. The rest are mailed to Paytrust's P.O. box, and they post the scanned PDF for my review.

I set the payment rules via their website: pay full amount, pay full amount up to [limit], pay specified amount. Or I can just wait for the notification in my email and pay it myself with a few bill clicks.

That's rather an interesting concept for an service. Just as i were thinking reading the summary that why do not banks have "pay upto X amount" kind of limitations, you come up with a comment about paytrust :D

Unfortunately, i think there's no such service in Finland

http://www.paytrust.com/

Most of my bills are transmitted electronically. The rest are mailed to Paytrust's P.O. box, and they post the scanned PDF for my review.

I set the payment rules via their website: pay full amount, pay full amount up to [limit], pay specified amount. Or I can just wait for the notification in my email and pay it myself with a few bill clicks.

How does it compare with Paytrust? ( http://www.paytrust.com/ )

http://www.paytrust.com/ - They receive your bills, open them, post them online, and allow you to pay them. It's awesome... i've moved 4 times since i started using the service, and only had to notify the gas/electric company!

Sure, it costs $9 a month. But I don't even have to RECEIVE my bills. My mailbox and trash have little to offer a would-be identity thief. And I'm not vulnerable to anthrax attack either. I cancelled my postal mail altogether. (Of course now I do Netflix so... um... if my choice is Netflix+Anthrax or No Netflix, I'll take the anthrax please.).

They receive your bills for you and scan them in. You can view them (or not) and have them automatically paid based on rules. 2 accounts are supported and 2 emails are notified -- set up for couples. At the end of the year you can order ($20 for 1 yr or $36 for past 3 yrs) a cd with all your bills on it. It is password protected and includes a java search engine that runs live off the cd.

I was horrified to get a notice from Paytrust recently about them joining with Intuit. I assume they were bought by Intuit.

Intuit has gotten so anti-consumer over the years. I almost wish Microsoft had won the lawsuit between the two companies, just out of spite.

When the Quicken yearly upgrade routine began in the late 90's, I migrated to GNUCash, then evenually went to using a basic OpenOffice spreadsheet for my account handling. I had been a loyal, paying user since the DOS days.

I was a major Turbo Tax paying customer for many years, too. Then they pulled that stupid DRM scheme a few years back. I tried an alternative suggested by a Slashdot poster (Tax Act, I think?), but that was only for a year, as I felt it was an inferior product. The next year, I went to H&R Block, which I'll proabably continue to do until I can file a EZ form again (maybe in a few years).

I absolutely love Paytrust -- I manage all of my bills and loans with it. However, I'm drafting a letter to physically mail to them once I've converted all of my accounts to an alternative or back to the check and post office routine again. I must tell them that Intuit has proven itself to be anti consumer, so I can't in god faith remain with an affiliated company.

I doubt they'll take notice, though. Such a shame.

working clicky (somebody forgot to "Check those URLs!")

Try using a payment service like PayTrust. All of your bills go to them and are scanned in and presented online. At the end of each year they offer to send you a CD with all of the bills for the year. The CD they send is browser-based but has a light Java app that acts as a local web server, allowing you to perform searches and sorting of the data through your browser. I've been using them(actually I started with paymybills.com which was bought out by them) for 4 years now and haven't regretted it once. I just ordered my 2003 CD which includes my 2000, 2001 and 2002 records. About half of my bills are delivered to them electronically now so those are HTML instead of JPEGs.

i've been using paymybills.com (now paytrust.com for years now.

I am a rather disorganized person, so i was looking for some service to simplify my management of bills. Online banking services at the time i signed up for paymybills only offered bill payment, not bill receipt. even now, i don't think that anyone else provides such a complete service.

with paytrust, the beauty (or terror, depending on your viewpoint) is that they receive all of your bills. Bills that are electronically deliverable are handled electronically. those that are not are snail-mailed to them, where they have an army of drones ready to scan them in as jpgs so that you can view them online.

there are the usual email notifications, scheduling, selective automatic payment of bills( you specify which bills, when, how much, limits, etc, as you would expect). you can also write checks like you would with a bank online payment system.

yes there are privacy concerns, and it is a little scary to no longer physically recieve bills (but also nice! less mail!) but i wagered that paytrust, a company in the business of providing this service was less likely to screw up than me, someone highly experienced at screwing up bill paying. to my knowledge, paytrust has yet to make any mistake. Something very private doesnt have to be sent to them.

i cant recommend them more highly.

From paymybills.com: This is no longer an active web site.

Looks like they didn't.

They were bought by PayTrust. They make money by charging $13 a month per user.

Just to make it clear how spectacularly cool this service is: it's not just online bill-paying. All your bills go to them (either electronically or through the regular postal service) and show up on the web. You can even have them pay the bills automatically. It's dang convenient.

With a bill presentment service you can pay everything from a single site using a single consistent interface and login. I've been using PayTrust for about a year now and I couldn't live without it.

When a new bill arrives, I get an email and I can view the scan of the bill online through the paytrust website. I can pay the bill automatically, if I choose, by establishing per-payee rules (always pay bill [foo] as long as it is under [y] dollars) and that sort of thing.

At the end of the year they send me a CD-ROM that contains all that year's bills and payments for my archives, allowing me to store everything in a much more space efficient way than I'd have with paper files.

It's a great service, although I don't know that I would find much benefit if they started handling all my mail and not just my bills. Mail I get is either bills, junk, or physical things which I wouldn't want in scanned form.

As of a couple years ago, I get every single one of my bills delivered online.

The USPS won't go out of business until junk mail is completely replaced by spam. That's where they make their money.

I think that way down underneath this feature there is an engine from CheckFree. I am not sure that PayTrust has anything to do with it. They certainly don't mention it on their web site.

I did some consulting with Checkfree (on one of its other products) 2 years ago when the bill payment and yahoo deals were first getting going.

At the risk of being redundant, Paytrust's privacy policy looks very sound. They purge certain data (comments, traffic patterns) after 12 months, share only aggregate statistics, encrypts cookies, etc. The model seems very sound, the only thing your personal info gets used for is talioring Paytrust (only) and logging in case of fraud.