I signed up with PayTrust about two months ago. I like their overall idea and process:

• You change your mailing address for your bills to PayTrust’s secure processing address
• You can add your expected bills to PayTrust, or just wait for them to start telling you they received bills.
• If you haven’t pre-configured your bill to arrive at PayTrust, they will alert you of an unanticpated bill, and you can go in and setup a biller for the bill.
• If the bill is expected, they email you who the bill is from, how much it is, and when its due.
• You can pay the bill via PayTrust (direct debit from your bank account) or via another mechanism (I use Quicken’s Bill Pay integration with Bank of America).
• If you want to see the bill, you can login to PayTrust and via your bill online. You can even download a PDF of the bill.

So far this has worked pretty well. I haven’t had any issues, and I haven’t lost any bills (that I know of).

What would I change?

• Its a bit disappointing that even though Intuit owns PayTrust and Quicken, there’s not any integration between them. I would love to see my PayTrust bills show up in Quicken and I could just pay them from my Quicken interface.
• The direct debit to make a payment gets taken out ~5 business days prior to when you want it to arrive at the biller. Bank of America doesn’t charge me till the date I want it to arrive there - even though they probably did send the money earlier. Bank of America treats it more like writing a check: it’s not really “arrived” until the other party has actually received the payment.
• The quality of the scan is somewhat poor. At home I was scanning ~600 dpi, it looks like the scans PayTrust makes are around 75-100 dpi. Its generally legible, but c’mon, space is cheap!

PayTrust Rating:

Tags: Bill Pay, PayTrust, Quicken

OK, so it’s not exactly what I was thinking, but it’s actually the best of all worlds. Let me explain.

Intuit (via Quicken) is the leader of personal finance software. There’s just no disputing that statement. I spent time evaluating other solutions, and nothing even came close to Quicken. There’s a reason Intuit rules every category they’re in: they know what features customers want. (Full disclosure: I currently work for Intuit, but it has nothing to do with what I’m writing, as you’ll see this is not a review of Quicken)

Anyways, I’ve been running Quicken on Windows XP in a VMWare environment since I migrated to Ubuntu Linux. Last I had looked, Quicken 2007 (which is the version I use) was not compatible with wine (a Windows Emulator for Linux). However, I was reading a Linux magazine last night and saw that Quicken 2007 was now supported via Crossover Linux. I looked up Quicken 2007 support on the Codeweavers page this morning, and lo-and-behold someone gave it Silver rating! There were a few known issues, but everything had a workaround, so I decided to give it a try.

I first tried Wine on its own, but it was clear that wasn’t going to work. Whatever hacks (Tips & Tricks) the Codeweavers guys had figured out wasn’t going to work on Wine alone. I installed the trial of Crossover Linux and followed the convoluted instructions to get Quicken running. And it works!!  (See my updated instructions to get Quicken running here)

I don’t need Windows anymore at all! So screw you even more, Micro$oft!