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

Actually, more than halfway, but who’s counting?

Tax season is over but, as you may have heard, Intuit had a rough end of season.  That’s why I dropped off the face of the earth for a while.  There were a lot of issues to be dealt with.

So I’ve been on vacation this week.  I ended up working pretty regularly.  I answered calls, returned emails, and thought about some work stuff that I need to deal with.  But I’ve had other things to do, too.

Toby had surgery this Monday to remove a cyst on his side.  It extended from the muscle to the rib.  He was in a lot of pain those first few days.  He’s doing much better now, and wants to run and play.  I’m taking him off pain killers so he’ll settle down a bit.

I made an action list of stuff I want to get done.  I finished 80% of it - the easy 80%.  I still want to scan all my bills/statements/receipts and go paperless.  I’ve found that scanning all the stuff is only part of the hard part.  Naming and filing everything logically takes a while, too.

Alright.  I’ll post more later.  Peace.