Easing the Headache of Paying Bills

Online bill paying has certainly made a nagging monthly chore easier. But there's still usually multiple Web sites to juggle -- and passwords to remember.

Now, there are several services that promise to consolidate your bills and let you pay them all in one place. We tested three services to see if they could streamline our tasks: Quicken Bill Pay, PayTrust and MyCheckFree.

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There certainly seems to be a market for such services. A 2007 survey from Harris Interactive and the Marketing Workshop found that those surveyed pay on average 11.5 bills a month. Seventy-four percent of surveyed households pay at least one bill online. And on average, respondents said they spend about two hours a month dealing with the logistics of paying bills.

Quicken Bill Pay (quickenbillpay.com) is a product of Intuit's Quicken money-management system. It costs $9.95 a month for the first 20 payments, allowing you to route 10 different bank accounts through Quicken Bill Pay. Additional sets of five payments are $2.49 per set. And there's a 30-day free trial for up to 20 payments.

3 Online Bill-Paying Services, Put to the Test
Company/Web Site	Price	Offering	Comment
Quicken Bill Pay quickenbillpay.com	It costs $9.95 a month for the first 20 payments, allowing you to route 10 different bank accounts. Additional sets of five payments are $2.49 per set. There's also a 30-day free trial for up to 20 payments.	A one-stop hub for paying all bills and managing monthly income flow.	We liked the site overall and the fact that we could integrate it with Quicken desktop software. But it took a lot of time to get the system set up.
PayTrust paytrust.com	Total Bill Management ($12.95 per month for 30 transactions), PayAnyone ($2.95 per month for no free transactions) and PayAnyone plus E-bills ($4.95 per month for no free transactions). Additional transactions under any of the three plans cost 50 cents.	Helps users pay bills on time by sending reminder notes when deadlines were near.	The fee disclosures were clear, but reminder emails were often duplicated with notes from the original source. We liked that you could also set up payments to non-conventional bills, like a babysitter or a friend you owe money to.
MyCheckFree mycheckfree.com	Free	Allows users to pay bills from over 400 different providers.	The site was easy to navigate, but it didn't allow us to manage our regular credit-card and student-loan payments.

You can also use Bill Pay with the desktop version of Quicken software, a program to track bills, spending and saving plans. If you do, you get some extra features with Bill Pay. (Our tester already had the desktop software.) That desktop software costs between $49.99 and $139.99 and is available in a CD-ROM version or for download directly from the site.

Setting up the account took us almost half an hour -- and we had to enter a ton of information. By the time we found our checkbook with our account number and the addresses and information of all the payees (the company or person you owe money to) -- the Web site had already timed out, and we had to log back in. It then took two more days for Quicken to verify our checking account.

Once we set everything up, it was fairly easy and convenient to pay all of our bills, including our two credit cards and our cellphone bill. It also allows you to schedule payments up to one year in advance so you don't miss any payments. However, we couldn't pay our cable and electricity bills because those accounts are in our roommate's name.

We liked the financial overview set-up of the Web page that let us keep constant tabs on our "cash flow center." The site monitored the amount in our checking and savings accounts and the amount owed on credit cards and "property and debt" to calculate the bottom line: our up-to-the-minute net worth.

PayTrust (paytrust.com), another product of Intuit, has three different services for paying bills: Total Bill Management ($12.95 per month for 30 transactions), PayAnyone ($2.95 per month for no free transactions) and PayAnyone plus E-bills ($4.95 per month for no free transactions). Additional transactions under any of the three plans cost 50 cents. (Receiving and paying a bill each counts as one transaction).

We received an email each time a new bill came in. That got a little annoying, since we were also getting notice emails from each of our payees as well. The service allows you to manually approve bills or set up automatic payments. A neat feature: You can set up payments for a range of debts, including babysitters and loan payments to friends. When we had problems setting up our account, customer service solved our issues over the phone in less than five minutes.

You can also export your payment information to online bill-managing programs or order a CD of your bills for recordkeeping purposes.

MyCheckFree (mycheckfree.com) allows users to pay bills from over 400 different providers. But that didn't include our bank, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. or our student-loan lender, SLM Corp., commonly known as Sallie Mae. MyCheckFree charges no fees for the site, but Lori Stepp, a spokesperson, says there's a chance that your bank might charge you to use the service.

The site did carry our cable company and our power company. But since those bills were not in our name, we couldn't add them to our MyCheckFree profile -- and thus couldn't pay them via the service.

Paying for newspaper subscriptions and cellphone service is an option through MyCheckFree, but users need to have their account number handy. It was easy to pay our Macy's credit card bill. We just needed to give our credit card number.

Overall, the site was easy to navigate. But since it didn't allow us to make payments on our regular credit card or our student loan, we didn't find it all that useful. In response, Ms. Stepp said that she encourages consumers to pay bills through their bank if it's easier, but that MyCheckFree can save bill payers the headache of "having to remember 10 different passwords for 10 different sites."

Whether you choose to pay your bills with a service or on your own, the fact remains -- you still have to pay them.

-- Shelly Banjo and Brittany Hite contributed to this article.