George wrote in :

On 6/4/2011 11:56 AM, Josh wrote:
On Sat, 04 Jun 2011 11:36:04 -0400,
wrote:

I just added Emory Hospital as an automatic payee. Wells Fargo has
no caller ID lookup so the chances of finding the address, city,
state automatically is 0. (I suggest adding this feature every
time it comes up but all I hear are crickets)

Also automatic payments has no way to send the exact amount of the
bill. I can set up payments, and I have the option of sending them
forever until I stop them, or sending xx number of payments. South
Trust had the option of "send until you pay $$$.cc."

Because all of my bills recur monthly, I rarely have to add payees
so the amount of trouble to switch banks is more trouble than to put
up with this, so all I can do is complain.

M. I. C. K. E. Y. M. O. U. S. E bank

This is why I've always used the "pull" method of automatic payment
(where you authorize the utility/school/credit card/etc to initiate
an ACH transfer each month for the bill amount), instead of the
"push" method of these bill-pay systems. I'd see if the hospital can
set that up if these are ongoing bills.

I've done this for all my recurring bills for 15+ years and never had
a problem with a bad withdrawal -- on the contrary, the one time I
tried to use "bill pay" several years ago with my credit union to pay
the rent I couldn't have autopayed via pull, on the third month they
took the money out of my account...and never sent it to the rental
agency. They did take responsibility, and refunded it along with the
late charge I paid the agency immediately, but I gave up after that.
Too much room for error/finger pointing, where with ACH withdrawal,
if the statement says "PG&E ACH $16.85", that's proof that PG&E
received that amount.

In the end, if the company pulling the money is legit, they're only
going to take what they should. If they're not...well, anyone with
your account and routing number (including someone you "bill pay" to)
can initiate a fraudulent payment anyway, so you don't really have
any more protection.

Josh

I would never ever give anyone the keys to my bank account. All
disbursements are made by me and I can think of a number of occasions
why that makes sense.

We use natural gas for heating/cooking/water heating. The highest bill
we ever had was ~ 160.00 There was bad weather so they didn't read the
meters and delivered estimated billing. Only little problem was they
delivered a bill for almost $700. If they could take whatever money
they wanted they would have caused other payments to fail since I only
keep sufficient money to pay bills in the account. Since I am in
control of my checkbook I called them and asked how much I really owed
them and they played the part of the 900lb gorilla and told me $690. I
refused to pay unless they gave me a reasonable estimate so the
"supervisor" had a powwow with someone and decided $150 would work.

The water company notified us they needed to change the water meter.
So they kept on making appointments and then no one would show. They
even cluelessly claimed it wasn't their problem because they hired a
contractor to do the work. Then the normal $22 water bill became $400+
with estimated fees because they tried to make their poor management
my problem. If they had the keys to our checking account they could
have taken the money and we would need to battle them and when they
did they could have caused other legitimate bills not to be paid. I
called and asked "how much do I actually owe you?" and received the
same we are megacorp you are stupid response that the other utility
gave me. After a long discussion the "manager" agreed to the normal
monthly bill.

I'm with Josh. Wrong billing is something you need to deal with
separately. I wouldn't stand for it either. Almost all my utility bills
and credit card payments are automagically by the "pull" method. When
Verizon started erroneous billing, I stopped it until they fixed their
paperwork. The gasportion of my bill has often estimated readings. I
either let them carry over to the next month or call them to correct it.
Even with Jersey's PSE&G that hasn't been a problem. The main
advantage (IMNSHO) is that if you forget to send a payment it is your
fault. If they forget to pull the money it is their problem. Now I
don't have to worry whether the payment gets there on time.


--
Best regards
Han
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