Ari Herzog put forth an interesting thought in his blog yesterday, suggesting a way the city can save $32,000.
I like the thinking. My principal question is, "What percentage of folks actually pay their bills online?" I suspect it's pretty low for a few reasons. One, many folks still don't have regular access to the Internet. Two, people might be reluctant to use credit cards to pay their bill.
But I do see the stack of papers being carried around by the city councillors and wonder if there is a better way.
2 comments:
Just for the record, you don't need to use a credit card to pay your bills online, you can just have the funds taken out of your bank account. The fee for doing so is 25 cents. If you use a credit card, the fee is much higher, as you are required to pay the transaction fee to the credit card company, which might be more like 25 dollars.
I pay online and would prefer to receive bills electronically and drop the snail mail. Ideally, the city would allow you to choose either method, but keep in mind that tracking who gets what and generating the billing email would require an online account system the city currently doesn't have and that might be expensive to acquire. They ought to look into it, however.
Thanks David. So I assume the city uses some third party intermediary to handle the transactions?
I do most of my own billing online, so I'm open to the idea. I do think, however, a bulk of residents aren't ready yet.
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