I currently pay all of my bills with one-time payments via each vendor's website. I do this because years ago (1997), I signed up with Intuit to pay my bills (at the time, they used a company called CheckFree to actually perform this function). Most of the time it worked fine, but several credit card companies began charging me fees for late payment, even though I had instructed Intuit to send the payments on time. I subsequently found out that CheckFree would actually snail-mail checks to certain vendors who could not properly handle electronic payments. They assured me that they mailed payments out sufficiently early so that the vendors would receive them by the due date. Why certain large banks that owned credit cards could not process electronic payments mystified me at the time; it's not like I was paying the corner deli - one of the vendors was Capital One Bank, for God's sake. After incurring various late fees, calling and writing the companies involved to have the charges reversed (mostly successful), and maintaining a list of which companies I could and could not pay through CheckFree due to this issue, I finally canceled the service due to all the hassle and told them exactly why I was canceling.
My bank offers free online bill-pay, and I was wondering if any of you use a similar service and what you think about it. Any heads-up on "gotchas" to watch out for would be greatly appreciated.
I should also mention that I do NOT want to initiate any automatic debit arrangements. I do not want anyone taking money out of my account automatically. I want to be the one who decides how much to pay and when to pay it. I'm currently going back and forth with one vendor who did not properly credit a payment I made, even though they sent me a receipt for it. It's much easier to argue the point when the money is still in your account and not in theirs. :)
TIA
Steve