How do you pay your utility bills?

It varies by billers, and how much fee they charge on using cards. I prefer autopay for billers on their website where I can add credit card and forget it (for ex. telecom and internet bills). For others, such as electric or rent bills, I prefer to pay using ACH but cannot schedule auto pay as I want to make sure I have enough balance in my bank account before making a payment. Plus, ACH has risks of NSF from both sides, which I don't like. I have tried using my bank account to directly pay bills, but not super convenient.

My preference is always auto pay, in preference order credit card, debit card, ACH. I only allow ACH access for my mortgage. I tend to use the merchants site to set it up, and allow them to draw. It would be nice if there was some kind of reach back where I could de-authorize these things with out interacting with each merchant.

Hi Megha,

I manage Accounts Payable for clients.

>1. How? Credit Card, Debit Card, Cash or Check.

EFT/Direct Debit > CC/DC manual/ACH/Wire Transfer > Check (US only)/Paypal/other expensive payment platforms.

2. Where? Biller Website, Through your Bank Account or others?

Automatic payments > Manual batches through accounting package > Manual payment via phone/biller portal

3. What are your current pain points, and what improvements would you like to see?

- Current clients: Biggest pain point is actually financial onboarding suppliers, e.g. verifying bank details / setting up direct debit etc.

- Current clients: Credit requests / getting suppliers to make changes to their invoices can be laborious.

- New Clients: Distributors such as Ingram Micro will place companies on stop credit as soon as one bill is overdue - Which seems to catch a lot of orgs off guard if they don't have a stable AP process in place.

- New Clients: Three way match is rarely done.

- New Clients: Often miss on-billing supplier costs. E.g. purchasing M365 licenses, provisioning them, paying them through AP, then forgetting to add them to a client agreement for invoicing.

4. Auto payments. Yay or Nay?

Absolutely Yay, but they should still undergo a three (actually five) way match, and be 'approved' by the decision maker before being debited.

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I reviewed https://www.neonforlife.com/ & https://medium.com/neonfinancial/neon-whats-all-the-fuss-abo... and I'm wondering:

- You are pivoting from b2c to both b2c & b2b? Seems sensible, I can't imagine b2c being very lucrative.

- For B2B, is it your 0% credit line that makes it worth using your dashboard instead of Xero/QBO/etc.? Or are there other benefits?

- How are you monetising this? You are shouldering such massive risk here, surely you will get masses of late payments & defaults ...

I really like that your B2C offering can prevent 'charging poor people for being poor'. Good on you