I was anxious to begin “Bill Pay” with the upgrade install of Quickbooks 2009 until I looked at the cost. I issued 295 checks last year, 24 ½ checks a month, on average. At $15.95 per month for 20 plus $6.95 to cover the additional 4 ½ checks, the annual cost totals $395.30, or $1.35 per check. I was astounded.
Then I compared this to what my bank charges for “Bill Pay” (pre slow- down). For the 295 checks I issued last year at ….well I won’t bother with the math, I’ll just try to quickly do it in my head…let’s see…that come to….ummmm….approximately……… Zero Dollars and Zero Cents per check or a total of Zero Dollars and Zero Cents for the whole darn year.
An option to preserve resources would be to run all of my years checks in January, or some other logical month, and save $188.22, bringing my per check cost down to a more reasonable 70 ¢ per check. Or do as I am doing now, which is to use my banks bill pay and save my QuickBooks time for other mundane activities.
You may have been wondering where the question is.
Am I missing some attributes of QB bill pay that aren't readily apparent?
And if not…
Is this a reasonable cost for paying bills?
Here I thought I was going to save money on postage, envelopes and check stock, but, in fact, I am just paying a different piper. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy as a clam NOT paying any thing to the post office, especially here in Parker, Colorado, but I would rather pay for envelopes and check stock to Deluxe than to fees to Intuit.
As is apparent from the tenor of this post, I am still a bit amazed, but before I moved on I wanted some other perspectives that might put the bill pay option for a low volume user into a more favorable light.
Sincerely yours, Richard Cook