Processing In-House | Online Bill-Pay Checks
Online bill pay provides consumers and businesses a convenient, low cost way to pay bills; it’s particularly effective when repetitive payments are involved.
Typically the bank provides secure access to a specific checking account, and the ability to pay vendors any sum at no cost. From a payment processor’s perspective, however, this payment vehicle presents a number of challenges.
The payments are commonly routed from the bank to a third party for processing. The third party will commonly hold onto the payments, accumulating a group of transactions over time, printing and mailing a group of checks at a later date.
Potential Problems
• Slow receipt of payments, even though the originator released the funds well in advance of the due date. Slow receipt or payment often causes late fees to be assessed on the customer’s account.
• Manually entered account information allows for data entry errors on the part of the originator, causing at best tedious posting efforts by the payment processor…and at worst, posting the payment to the incorrect account. In the event of recurring billing cycles, this error is repeated at each billing cycle.
• Lack of payment coupon/stub information makes tracing where a payment should be applied difficult, at best.
• Lack of payment coupon/stub information and the varying formats of online bill-pay checks makes automating the posting process of these checks very challenging—typically resulting in manual processing.
• Researching the erroneous posting of these checks is nearly impossible after-the-fact, commonly resulting in writing off the debt of someone who claims they paid through their online banking.
F&E PaymentPros
Automated Online Bank Check Processing Solution
• Now, your receivables department gets daily notification of funds deposited directly into the correct bank account. A detailed report lists the accounts paid on, and an electronic file is automatically uploaded into the billing system to credit each account paid. No more randomly received physical checks in the mail.
• Your staff can update the posting file one time, and have it automatically corrected for all future payments. No more dealing with the incorrectly entered account number—billing cycle after billing cycle.