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Paperless Billing?
Bruha writes "Almost all of the bills I receive today have the option to go paperless. I already pay all utilities and creditcards online but have yet to tell them to stop sending me a physical bill even though they heavily advertise the advantages of it. My concern are mistakes they could audit out and claim were not there. Has anyone experienced any problems with paperless billing or are my worries without merit?"
The only constraint is the amount of time you are willing to spend to correct the problem. It would take you weeks to just bring it to their attention. Not to mention to produce the paper trail and get resolution. The real problem with all the consolidation is the marginalization of the individual consumer. Nobody gives a flying-F these days. The are certainly not concerned about one customers experience.
My biggest problem with online statements is that they are only kept online for six months. Between doing taxes and reconciling business expenses, that isn't nearly long enough! It doesn't seem logical for that sort of limit.
Anybody know a credit card company that keeps records for at least 18 months? Citibank is killing me!
I get a PDF statement emailed to me from my Aussi telephone company and save $5/month to boot. Best of all, just have to file the PDF into a network folder and I've got a "hard copy" to refer to.
"1984" was ment to be a warning, not a guidebook. You hear that Kim Jong-il!? BushCo?!
I've paranoid about my bills, too (and I save my paper bills, in a stack, for years and years, after paying them online and marking them with the date, amount paid, and payment id). It's useful now and again, like when I look at my phone bill and wonder if it's always been that high.
And once I got a credit card company to reduce my APR again when I had an extremely valid complaint that the notification sucked (there was no text in any actual bill mentioning the change).
But I've never dealt with an error. Once my bank screwed something up, but they noticed it themselves and fixed it before I even complained.
The thing is, I can't quite move to the paperless bills just because they seem so easy to abuse. Even if I save a copy of the email or webpage, an HTML file is child's play to alter, even for a layman; forging or altering a paper bill is tougher.
I think what we need is electronic bills, with a way to archive a verifiable copy locally. I.e., if it's signed by the company's private key, etc. etc., you can prove you didn't tinker with it.
We also need a format for bills such that they can be plugged into the standard money management programs directly.
Is anyone doing this? It would be nice to get rid of those stacks of old bills.
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
In the last five years I've been able to get down to writing out 2 checks a month (rent and my net connection - time warner sux and I can't pay it online.) Everything else (I have a ton of bills) gets paid online, and I don't get statements sent.
I went through my filing cabinet last week and rid myself of all past credit card statements (so many cards in 5 years, all at lower and lower rates). When I was done, I had shredded an entire drawer full of garbage. The best part is that I can't fill it back up because I don't get paper sent to me. The only thing I kept were the account closed notices, but only until I order a new credit report to verify closed accounts.
Save a tree, man. Get rid of the paper (and recycle your shredded stuff!)
"Why do you consent to live in ignorance and fear?" - Bad Religion
My roommate tried going paperless. The telephone company double charged him, and then refused to refund the money. Instead, they gave him a credit for the amount. Problem being, he needed the money they took for food. (He has a nasty habit of letting his bills pile up until they're $300, $400, or more, and only paying when they threaten his service.)
He also had the gas company claim they didn't receive payment. They did. He showed them proof. Problem resolved, but it was still quite a hassle.
Long story short, he doesn't do any electronic billing of any sort anymore. (BTW, we're on the south side of Chicago, in case anyone cares.)
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.
I have my account with the Swiss post office, which works pretty nicely (although you could insert any Swiss bank in its place--bank transfer numbers are standardized and inter-bank payments don't cost extra.)
There are some regularly occurring, fixed-amount bills (gym, rent, etc.) for which I have standing payment orders. Anything occasional or variable, I get a paper bill in the mail, with a payment slip.
This is about 1/3 of an A4 piece of paper, containing recipient, amount, and payer, as well as bank info. It has a long-ass numerical code (about 25 numbers) which, along with the recipient account, I have to type into my online banking page.
When I've paid a bill, I just write 'paid date xyz' on the slip and archive it for 2 years--works a charm. The post office also sends me a paper printout of my account activity every month.
It's a great system, it sounds like it's a lot of effort, but I can pay my bills once a month within about 20 minutes time, including archiving paperwork. And I have both electronic and tangible means of tracking my payments.
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
I assume you're joking about the envelope-licking, but one incentive to go paperless is that it reduces their costs, which means they'll be capable of charging you less. These days, it's easy enough to roll any balance to a new card, so those with good credit can demand a lowered APR (case in point: about a year ago, I decided to cancel one of my cards, and told the sexy-voiced woman they transferred me to that another credit limit hike wouldn't make me change my mind, so they offered to permanently drop my APR to 6%; that changed my mind).
I agree...Don't rely on the e-mail as a reminder. Just because you don't get the bill, doesn't mean that you don't have to pay. Any company will gladly re-send the bill if you didn't receive it as expected.
Related to the original question, I work for a local cable co. and developed their e-mail bill notification software. Once the bill is sent we don't really care about keeping a copy ourselves. We record the transactions and are usually able to reproduce a bill that closely resembles the original. Since going to e-mail notification, we needed a way to store a static image of the last two bills. That's only for the customers convenience. As far as auditing goes, the only thing that makes any difference is the transactions. When you get the bill, we have to be able to prove that the items on the bill match the transactions that we have on file. There's too many customers to review them individually, so its always up to the customer to review their bill for accuracy (We've made a lot of mistakes that have cost us money and they rarely get reported... whereas, if you get overcharged, you'll bet we hear about it).
Oh...and sometimes the paper bills have just as hard a time getting delivered.
The cost of sending an invoice includes the cost of paper, printing, processing, and postage.
Your provider gets a discount on bulk mailing. When you choose to go electronic, the bulk discount gets upset and the remaining mailings cost more per item. It's not just the quantity in the mailing, but also the density. Cable companies usually get good density, whereas credit card companies probably don't.
So, you'll probably not see the savings passed on until they can see concrete dollar savings themselves, which won't likely happen until the participation rate goes high enough. But even more likely is that the savings will be spread around more and you'll never see them because they'll be hidden in the delay of price increases on services.
...Ew...I think I've been infected by the Marketing Dept...