Online bill pay: PayTrust.com or other?

[clp]

I'm looking at online banking, and the main time saver is bill paying.

It looks like PayTrust.com is the biggest (maybe the only) survivor after the dot-com bust a few years ago, that offers a wide range of services not found in the 'free' bill pay services from the banks I've viewed. I initially ignored them because of the cost, but after evaluating them & other services, I'm seriously considering PayTrust. The monthly fee, about $13, is not a big deal if they really save me significant time keeping my bills & checking account records accurate.

I like the idea of them receiving paper bills, scanning them, & sending them to me for approval.
Other bill pay solutions from banks & credit unions seem to require more manual work and time on my part (ie, they don't receive & scan paper bills), and I might spend more time keeping my own records and the online records.

I don't want to use a financial pkg on my PC; the Calc spreadsheet from OpenOffice has been fine for my needs.

The epinions site & other reviews I've found on PayTrust are mostly positive, except for a few yrs ago, when they had support problems. One user I know has had no problems in more than 5 yrs.

Does anyone know of a competing service to PayTrust?

Does anyone using PayTrust (or similar service) have any strong opinions about their service, w/ facts to back them up?

Thanks.
clp

[fred333]

I have never used them before.

[hobosam]

I've been using them for about 7.5 years now. When I started it was paymybills.com in about 2004 I think Pay Trust and Paymybills merged into on site. I never had a problem with them at all. I've called costumer service many times not for anything bad just your normal questions and help has alway been great and fast. One of the great things about the service is the back up they give you when a credit card bill comes late with no time to pay or when they say a payment was received late. Pay trust will write letters and call them on your behalf. The few times this has happen to me over the years pay trust has always taken care of it. I love the Smart balance feature they have it will log into your banks web site and balance your check book for you. I've never had a late fee again. I can't say enough good things about this company. The only bad thing I can say is that they only keep your records online for 3 years think then they take them down and archive them. I would suggest getting the cd at the end of each year for your back up copies


Zac

[bill.mccrosky@gmail.com]

I've been using PayTrust for years. I travel a lot and rely on PT to manage my bills. It has been an excellent service - much better than similar bank offerings. PT substantially pays for itself by enabling me to pay my bills on or close to the due date - I easily pay for the PT monthly charge with interest earned on my checking account balance. PT also lets me change a bill between submission and payment - a very useful feature that my checking account online checking account does not provide. The ability to look up bills at a later date has been very helpful. It is also very helpful to have all account numbers, contact numbers, etc online and easily accessible.

Customer service is always courteous and helpful.

I have had trouble with the SmartBalance feature. I think the problem is security on my checking account, but the feature has never worked correctly.

I would also like to see tighter integration of PT and Quicken. It would be really nice to submit a payment when I record a check in Quicken. As it stands now, I have to make separate entries into PT and Quicken. Since Quicken owns PT, this should be possible.

[Señor Pantalones]

I've been a paytrust user for a long time. Probably 7-8 years? Time flies. I'm not sure.

Here's what I can tell you...

Good


I've stuck with them for over 7 years. There aren't many sites or services I can say that about other than Amazon, Ebay, Google and the other big players.
The rules you can set up are great. You can automatically pay every bill, you can pay if it's under a certain amount, you can have PayTrust notify you, etc.
You can send checks to private recipients (a lot of other bill-pay services only work with major companies), so I have my doctor, landlady, and anyone else who might get a check from me sometimes in there. You can even add a recipient for a single one-time check.
Get all your transactions on CD at the end of every year.
I really don't think about my bills much at all anymore. I use Mint to track my spending on them, but I never have to worry about paying them on time. It's the ideal situation. I can look at Mint and say ok, I really need to turn lights off around the house more, or I need to call AT&T and find out why they charged me $100 when my usual phone bill is $60, but I don't need to worry about whether or not I'm in trouble with a collection agency or late on a payment. It just doesn't happen when you let someone else do it.

Bad


That CD of all your transactions costs $20, which is silly. They should just offer a big downloadable file at the end of every year for free (or for much cheaper than $20) as an option.
Their envelopes are so generic that (honest truth here) I've had three landlords rip up/throw out my first check, thinking it was junk mail
Logging in to their site is cumbersome. It's all for security, and yes I do feel secure on their stite, but I still find it annoying.
Ok, this is the mother of all bad things, and it took them 7 years to finally screw up. I was in the process of switching bank accounts last week (thanks to Mint's Ways to Save (https://wwws.mint.com/login.event?nextPage=offer.event)), and I accidentally sent a gas bill payment on my old account, which had $0 in it. Even though I had another account with money in it, PayTrust completely shut down my account, canceled all upcoming payments, made me jump through hoops to resolve it, and then took five days to re-activate my account. The whole process took nine days. I'm still mad about it, but I can just hope they re-examine this process for similar issues in the future.
Overall the site is kind of cumbersome and 2003-ish. When you're familiar with sites like Mint, Kayak, Amazon, and so many others that try to streamline your experience, entering info, adding payees, etc. on PayTrust feels tedious and lengthy. Like my reply!

I'd say check it out -- but see if your online bank or credit card offers similar services before paying someone else...

[Gia]

I use Billeo's toolbar for online bill payments. It is a free browser plugin that works both with IE and Firefox. I must say it not only helps in paying bills or shopping online but it also tracks when my bill is due and keep records of my paid bills. Some of the features that i liked is that it auto-fill forms and manages my password for various online account. Very useful as it combines all this application into one package. You can download it from http://www.billeo.com

[Volkler]

I was a Paytrust customer for nine years, and recently switched to my credit union's free bill paying service, which is run by CheckFree.

My recommendation would be to use your bank or credit union's free online bill paying service instead of Paytrust.

At least in my case, the free bill paying service not only lets me make electronic payments where possible, and will send checks for me, but will also accept and archive electronic invoices.

What Paytrust offers in addition for its fee is the scanning of paper bills, and listing the bills in the Paytrust bill inbox by Payee, minimum pay, total due, and date due. To me that turned out to be not so valuable, because half of my billers continued to send me paper bills anyway.

An earlier poster talked about a problem with Paytrust caused by switching banks, and something similar happened to me. Suffice it to say that Paytrust customer service is lacking. I would never again authorize Paytrust to make automatic electronic debits from my account, based on that. :mad:

[mcgeady]

I'm late to this dance, but let me add my two cents. By and large, I agree with Mr. Pants, above. I've been a Paytrust customer for something like 12 years, or nearly as long as they've been around. When I was single and traveling 100k miles/year, they were a lifesaver, or more accurately, a credit-score saver. Instead of my bills piling up a the post office, I could pay them from whatever city in the world I happened to be in at the time. For $14/month, it was fabulous.

I think it is important to distinguish Paytrust from most bank bill-paying services. They either scan your paper bills (which you have sent to them by the payee), or scrape the website of the payee to determine the bill amount, they record the details of the bills, and allow you an automated rule system for determining when to pay which ones and how much. This is much, much more sophisticated than most bank systems, which are essentially on-line check-writing systems. In the latter case, you still need access to the bill, and it it is on paper, you may not have it, and if it is online, you have to log into a dozen sites to get all the info (unless you life is simpler than mine -- Paytrust pays 25-30 bills/month for me).

Yes, they have a Web 1.0 GUI and vibe. Yes, Paytrust has screwed up a few times over the years. Yes, if you ever NSF on a Paytrust-linked account, all hell breaks loose. Yes, it is stupid that they charge for the annual CD. Yes, in recent years the first line of their customer support has gotten dumber and dumber.

My biggest problem (with Mint, not Paytrust) is that since most of the "checks" seen by my bank are "written" by Paytrust, the payee and category information is lost. There is no current way to link Paytrust and Mint, so Mint's utility is pretty low for me at the moment. But I could not live without Paytrust.