Online Bill Paying: Reviews

Most large banks -- and even many smaller ones offer free online bill payment to anyone who signs up for online banking. Most banks let you pay any vendor online, whether or not they support electronic payment (the bank… will send out a paper check drawn on your account). Bank of America, Citibank, Commerce Bank, Wachovia, JPMorgan Chase and many more offer this service, usually by association with CheckFree.com. Also, some banks sweeten the deal by throwing in mobile banking, financial planning tools and other perks. If your bank offers online bill paying, you should try their service before paying extra for Paytrust.com or another service.

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Paytrust.com is the most comprehensive online bill-paying service -- but it's not free. Users can pay any bill, regardless of whether the biller allows electronic payment. If you want to have all your bills presented to… you online, this service will receive them, scan them in, send you e-mail notification and allow you to pay electronically. Paytrust.com makes bills accessible online for one year and keeps eight years' worth of records. Paytrust will accept all your bills so you never have to worry about missing an important bill in the mail, making it a good choice for those who are frequently out of town for long periods. The downside? Paytrust costs at least $5 per month plus 50¢ every time you receive or pay a bill, and it's not compatible with Quicken.

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If your bank doesn't offer online bill pay, and you prefer to receive your bills by mail at home instead of having them forwarded to a scan-in service like Paytrust, MyCheckFree.com is an excellent (and free) option. The… service's sister site, CheckFree.com, is the engine for many commercial banks' bill-paying services, but anyone can sign up for MyCheckFree. However, you can only pay billers who are affiliates of the MyCheckFree.com site, which can be a drawback if some aren't listed. That means you may still end up paying some bills manually.

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Both Microsoft Money and Intuit Quicken personal finance software programs offer extensive bill-pay and bill-management services, but they also let you track all your finances. Overall, reviews give Quicken the edge over… Money. You can pay bills online through Quicken software, but it costs an extra $10 per month to pay up to ten bills per month. Though this is costly, one benefit is that your transactions are transferred and recorded in the software as part of a total plan to manage your finances. And Quicken is compatible with over 5,300 online financial institutions, including PayPal. Quicken and Money are discussed more thoroughly in our separate report on accounting software.

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