Online Bill Paying Reviews

Online bill paying encompasses a lot of services and products. We found reviews for PayPal and Google Checkout -- two services that allow you to make online purchases (but not necessarily pay specific bills) -- at CNet.com and Consumer Reports. We also found reviews at Money magazine and CNet.com for Quicken and Money, two financial software packages that offer online bill payment. Articles at Bankrate.com provide useful how-to information, along with pros and cons of online bill paying in general.

Paying bills online is a secure way to avoid escalating postage costs and cut down on check writing, say many reviews. There are an increasing number of online bill-payment options. Those include banks, specialized bill-pay websites, portals providing bill or peer-to-peer payments, bill-pay enabled software and credit card companies, as well as paying each individual biller directly on their website. Online banking in particular has gotten more sophisticated, allowing customers to pay bills, transfer funds and manage accounts online. Banks have also added more bells and whistles such as aggregated account data, mobile banking and customer banking alerts for their clients.

To distinguish between these services, we first need to define a few terms. You may think of "paying bills" as the entire process: going through your mail pile, looking back at your checkbook to see when you last paid up, and writing and finally mailing the check. But the financial world defines the steps involved more precisely. "Bill presentment," or actually receiving and viewing the bill, is the first transaction. "Bill payment" is the act of transferring money to the vendor, either electronically or with a paper check.

Because of that, experts say that if you only have a handful of bills to pay each month, subscribing to a full-featured service like Paytrust.com (owned by Intuit -- the makers of Quicken) may be overkill. Many articles also question the need to pay extra for online bill-payment services when so many banks and credit card companies now offer their own free online bill-payment services, which often add extra perks such as airline miles, affinity points, cashback bonuses and more.  ... Continued

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You used to have to go with a paid service if you wanted to pay most or all of your bills online. But these days, so many banks and credit card companies offer free online bill payment that it only makes sense in certain situations to pay for such a service. Those who spend a lot of time traveling might consider Paytrust.com, which actually serves as your billing address for your creditors, who send all your bills to Paytrust instead of to your home. This greatly decreases your chances of missing an important paper bill while you are out of town. PayPal is an online wallet, not an online bill pay service. Though you can pay many merchants through a PayPal account, the vendor must accept PayPal. So you generally won't be able to pay your water bill or cable bill online with PayPal (unless it's accepted by your particular utility).