In my recent webinar, I went on record to say that it was only a matter of time before the industry becomes mostly paperless.  And all of us could probably use less paper in our lives.  Personally, sometimes I feel like I’m drowning in paper. 

But, I have a confession.  I’ve tried paperless billing.  It just doesn’t work for me.

Don’t get me wrong.  I get the emails.  I look at them.  Sometimes I even go to the biller’s website to review the bill.  If I can remember the password, that is.  It just doesn’t work for me as a “system” for managing and paying my household’s finances.

Forgotten passwords aside, here’s the issue…it requires that I fundamentally change how I manage the household bills, basically overnight.  Currently, I pay our bills on the 15^th and the 30^th of each month, because that’s when we get paid.  To organize our bills I use a pocket folder.  Based on the due date of the bill, it goes on the left or the right pocket.  It’s simple.  And it works.

My pocket folder filing system aside, I’m a big fan of technology.  I have a smart phone and keep my “to do” list and my grocery list on it.  When we are out of an item I scan it with my phone’s bar code scanner to put it on my list.  I do mobile banking.  I have a Kindle and an iPad.  Perhaps, I’m not, as my husband gently reminded me one day “an early adopter.”  (The iPad was out for seven months before we bought one.) But I’m not exactly a technology laggard either.

In theory, I love the idea of paperless billing.  But right now, getting 20 emails a month about my bills just isn’t going to work.  I don’t want to visit 20 different websites to pay the bills.  (According to some sources, the average household receives 20 bills each month.  In this case I’m assuming I’m nothing more than average.) Not to mention that if I go to 20 websites, I have 20 different log-ons and then have to find the “pay your bill here” button. 

I’m tired just thinking about it.

But in the past few months, two new players have introduced services that could help me.  Manilla and Doxo.  Manilla bills itself as Personal Account Management Service while Doxo calls itself a digital filing cabinet.  While there are key differences in the services, both of them centralize the bill receipt and payment process by allowing customers to have bills sent to and paid from the same website.  A key benefit to consumers is that a “real” bill is received – real, meaning that it looks just like the one that arrives through snail mail – not just an email notification that the bill is available for viewing on the billers website. 

Paperless billing needs to be more than just a bunch of emails in customer’s email accounts.  They’ll get lost.  A service that works as an online file folder (or whatever you want to call it) might be the answer to getting customers to go paperless.  I just don’t understand why banks are letting third party services take this business away from them. I’m not convinced that consumers really want to give that amount of control to a third party.

Gosh, I hope someone from my bank is reading this…

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