CheckFree Brings WebPay Service to Small Business
Online bill-paying service will extend to small business next year, with a few integration pains.Lincoln Spector, special to PCWorld.com
Your bank probably lets you pay your personal bills online. Soon, it may extend the same convenience to your small business. CheckFree, the back-end provider of most such services, expects to release a small business version of its WebPay service early next year.
CheckFree handles the added features that make online bill-paying workable, such as invoice number tracking. If you're paying bills electronically through your bank or through Quicken, there's a good chance that CheckFree is behind it. The price of the service is up to the financial institutions providing it. Most will probably charge from $10 to $20 monthly, perhaps more if you exceed a set number of payments.
As its name implies, WebPay allows you to pay your bills from a Web site. Whose Web site? It could be CheckFree's, but it's probably that of your bank, credit union, or other financial institution.
WebPay acts much like the bill-paying features in Quicken or Money. You can make individual payments, set up reoccurring ones, and pick a future date for the bill to be paid. You can examine a list of payments made. You might even be able to receive your bills electronically, although only if the company that bills you has signed up for this feature. The recipient doesn't have to sign up to get your money, however; if need be, CheckFree will cut and mail an old-fashioned paper check.
Giving Us the Business
WebPay for Small Business will do pretty much the same thing. But when you set up a payment program for your business, you'll get additional options not typical in a business account. For example, the service will support invoice numbers, any discounts, and your company's tax identification number.
As a small business, you probably already have an accounting program and may be making payments through that. QuickBooks users will have no need for WebPay for Small Business; they already have similar business bill-paying features (and CheckFree probably handles the payments). But neither Quicken nor Money have built-in payment systems that are particularly business friendly. Those programs have focused on personal finances. If you use one of them, you may find yourself torn between the better business features of WebPay and the convenience of making payments through your preferred accounting software. WebPay will allow you to download your payment records into Quicken or Money, which should help.
CheckFree plans to start beta testing WebPay for Small Business at Zions Bank in January. The company expects to make the service available in March.