How Does Online Bill-Paying Work?

Video Transcript

"So you owe some money and have a short time to get it to the people? Haven't paid your electric bill? I'm Chris Cook with Security Awareness Incorporated, and I'm going to tell you how to get your money places fast. Online bill-paying, there are typically three different ways to do it. The first is to have an account with the actual merchant or place that you owe the money, such as an electric company, a department store or something like that. You would go to their website and you would input your bank account information. You'll need to have your account name, exactly as it is on the account, your routing number, typically on the bottom left-hand side of your checks, and the account number itself. You may need to inform your bank that you're going to have electronic transfers coming from this account. You can then go to the merchant's website and schedule your payments to go, and sometimes you can even do them on-demand as you need to pay your bills. The second way to do online bill-paying is to do it through your bank itself. You can...a lot of banks now offer online bill-paying as a service through...you know, to special account holders. You would go to your bank's website, log in under your account information, and then you would need to enter the information for each merchant. So you would set up your electric company, you would set up your credit cards if you wanted to, you could set up your cable company -- whatever bills you want to pay online through that bank account. You would need to put in their information -- their address, usually. Sometimes if they're going to wire directly, you'll need an account information from that merchant as well. And then you can log in through the bank's website and schedule the payments or do them on-demand through there. The third way is to use a third-party program or a website. Express BillPay is one to do it through the website or Quicken is a program that you can use on your computer itself. Typically, with one of these is you're going to need to set up both sides of the information. You'll need to put in your bank account information, the routing number, the account number, your name, et cetera. And then you'll also need to put in the merchant information for the money where you owe the account. Hope this helps you out in getting your bills paid. Hope you got to see this before your electric bill was cut. I'm Chris Cook with Security Awareness Incorporated."