RSS feedYep, I pay everything I can online, who wouldn’t if they could? Each month I pay several bills with BPay through my bank. It’s easy, and to quote the BPay site:
making life easier_
Not sure if the underscore is a qualifier at all, but there you go, making life easier_.
With Internet banking, you’d like to have a BPay account set up and configured already, so that when a bill comes in, all you need to do is click on it and type in the dollar amount.
Of course it isn’t this easy, because the intelligent boffins at companies such as Telstra, decide to use a different 20 digit biller number for each new bill, even if it is the same account. In fact, successive Telstra bills have successive page numbers, meaning I can put all my printed bills together and have a 62 page book of Telstra bills. Not particularly useful reading material, but amusing and handy for looking for missing pages at tax time.
So even though you’ve set up an account to click on, you still need to enter the 20 digit reference number for each bill. The account, by the way, consists of a 4 digit biller number, and that’s it. Compared to 20 digits, it’s almost a waste defining the account in the first place.
However, there are companies who have done it right, so it is not like Telstra are limited by the BPay technology. My mobile phone carrier, for example, uses the same biller reference number for every bill, so I don’t need to type anything in except the dollar amount. Now that’s making life easier_.
Telstra? Well, maybe we should just sell them off, and see how long it takes them to go bankrupt. I guess they could always sell off all the copper to BHP!