Does anyone use bill pay at their bank to pay their bills that are usually paid electronically from your checking account but sometimes they send a bank check from your checking account instead. What causes that change in the way they are sent
They often send a check if the vendor doesn’t accept their version of billpay. You just have to allow extra time.
My son has an account at Chase, he has a debit card and does bill pay but I don’t think he has a checkbook. I’m guessing they just send a Chase check and debit his account.
More often than you would think, the bank does send a physical check to whoever you are paying.
Strange to me, but I recently found that out in a meeting with some bankers.
I pay pretty much all our bills via bill pay. It’s greatly reduced the need for checks and postage stamps.
There are a couple of vendors that get sent bank checks, I presume it’s because they don’t have an account at our bank. There might also be a fee for the check recipient. A couple of vendors require your authority to allow them to take the payment from your bank account, or charge you a fee for paying their bill. Since I don’t like that, I opened a second checking account and fund it the minimum balance for no fee checking and use that for any vendor that requires access to your bank acct.
We’ve been doing that for the last six months too. We also use billpay to send money to individuals as well, I feel it’s more secure than services like Venmo or sending personal checks via USPS.
I haven’t even had a checkbook in 10 years. My utiliities, except fro water and sewer, are on autopay. Those I use my bank bill pay. If the business can do ACH then there won’t be a check, it’s electronic. My wastewater bill can’t do ACH so they are sent a check. when I had home projects, I used the bank bill pay for that and they are sent a physical check. I have also used bank bill pay to pay another individual.
I have used it but I limit my use of checks. At my job I am in the finance department and the amount of fraudulent checks that are attempted to be passed on us is alarming. It doesn’t happen every day or even every month. When it does happen it is usually a wave of fraudulent checks. The crooks just need a copy of your legitimate check with banking info. They print up similar but fake checks and try and cash them. We have positive pay with the banks that the info must match what is sent to the bank and significantly reduces the fraud but it is still alarming.
You are best to not use checks and this limits the opportunity for crooks to steal your money.