I can't help myself from commenting on this. I agree whole-heartedly
that being able to see your eBills *inside* Money would be a feature ...
at the top of my list of things I'd like to see in the product.

And, in case you're listening, Microsoft Money Team, by this I mean
being able to view the bills, move them around from a 'not paid'
in-box/folder, to a paid folder, and then save them to disk. So I can
later re-open past bills, to look at, just like one does with paper
bills one saves in a hardcopy file, of say utility bills or credit card
bills. The way MSN Bill Pay works now, it deletes eBills from your
account after six months, how un-useful and user unfriendly! The only
way to save bills now (in MSN Bill pay) is do a crude 'save as' from
your browser, and save the entire web page, ... how cheesy and crude.

There were some past versions of Money, (97, 98 or 99 as I recall), that
actually did this (did actual eBill Presentment in Money -- not just a
web-served MSN Bill Pay page Money displayed). That feature was dropped
after one or two years.

Why was it dropped? (if I recall all this correctly), the OFX standard
(www.ofx.net) was just coming into being, and it's original designers
(Microsoft and Intuit), designed things in such a way that there was a
revenue stream created where none had existed before. Specifically, OFX
specifies that a 'directory server' be used by any biller (an electric
utility company, for ex.) wishing to present to payers (that's you and
me) their eBills. The biller 'enrolls' in the directory server, and by
doing so announces to anyone interested that he has eBilling available.
Interested parties (payers) search the directory server to determine
if the biller in fact is setup with eBills. This is what happens when
you go to checkfree.com and look at their list of eBillers.

The revenue stream: As an example, you are an electric utility, and it
costs you say $25,000 to print, mail out and subsequently process
payments for 10,000 hardcopy paper bills each month (That $25k goes to
Xerox for color printers, the US Postal service for mailings, and to
service bureaus and banks for processing hardcopy checks). Let's say
you're Microsoft (in the form of MSN Bill Pay, or checkfree.com) or
Intuit. You approach the electric utility and say 'for $5,000 each
month, you can enroll in our eBilling directory server, and we can
process 10,000 eBills for you'. So it's $.50 vs. $2.50 per bill. That
is $5,000 that Microsoft did not receive before, a new revenue stream.
Scale those numbers up from 10,000 to say 100,000 bills. Multiply by
the number of utilities, phone companies, and credit card companies
across the US that mail out monthly bills, and you see there's some real
$$$ involved. More so, there are additional, but somewhat less
tangible, incentives for MS (and Intuit) to do this: It draws traffic to
their MSN Money websites, it may sell additional software and services
to companies (to setup their billing systems), and it develops a market
for third party companies to sell software to do the eBilling systems
(more players using windows software).

Wow, ... didn't intend that reply to be so long.

jheddings wrote:

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jheddings wrote:
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I second that. This would be a great feature. My bank already has an
eBills feature and integrates with Money. I wonder why MS doesn't
provide this feature?

Brian

As many companies are starting to standardize their eBilling methods,
services like mycheckfree.com are able to get real bills from certain
providers. The bill manager in Money is great, but I think that Money should
be extended to go get eBills from providers that support this feature.