Somebody make this: A place for producers and consumers to connect to pay bills | Hacker News Reader

Somebody make this: A place for producers and consumers to connect to pay bills

5 pointswwwtyro4 comments

You'd have to get both groups to sign up for it, and I'm not going to claim to know how to go about doing that, but here's how I imagine it working in a nutshell:

When I sign up for a new service (ISP, apartment rent, water, electricity, etc.), I offer them my BillMan (the name of this hypothetical startup) account id. When my bill is due, it shows up on my account (with a list of other bills on the same page) with a button next to it I can click that immediately approves and makes payment for the due amount.

So it might look like this:

         ISP  60.40 [pay button]
        rent 848.67 [pay button]
 electricity 121.33 [pay button]

Why not use autopay solutions, you might ask? They scare me. What if my ISP charges me $6,040 instead of $60.40? That would mean gruel for a month for this grad student.

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Quicken Bill Pay goes 99% of the way for you. It keeps track of all your bills, reminds you when the due dates are coming up, notifies you of unusually high charges, and connects to over 4400 financial institutions to pull in exact billing amounts and let you pay bills from up to 10 different bank accounts. They'll print and mail the checks for you if you don't want to or can't pay electronically.

The only thing it doesn't do is know the exact amount due for non-participating companies. Since you are afraid of automatic payments (and 100x mistake scenarios about as likely as winning the lottery), you'll be reviewing your bills manually anyway, so typing in a bill amount once or twice a month doesn't seem like such an inconvenience that it'd be valuable enough to get all the ISPs and utilities to participate.

That's about as good as you'll ever get. Getting every little landlord, every township/city water and sewer company, every trash collector, etc. to connect to some service to push customer bills to it is impossible. There are hundreds of thousands of them that aren't online at all and have no incentive to add extra work and cost to make their 3 tenants' or 10,000 residents' online bill pay software more complete. There's not even an IT department to try to sell the benefits to.

Secretly, Pitney Bowes (the company that handles all of the hardcopy mail billing already) is working on this. I got an early look at their ipad and webapp and it is surprisingly sexy. Instead of waiting for a startup to try and cobble together a ton of hard to work with enterprises, PB already has everyone on board due to longstanding billing relationships which is awesome. SHHHHHH don't tell anyone...

I suspect there are localized versions of these already out there.

As a Canadian, we have ePost.ca which is run by the government. Basically a digital mailbox for paying bills.

My bank does do this. Has since before 2000. If the receiver wasn't modern enough to receive the amount electronically, the bank would print and mail a check. Seriously.

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