Auto Bill-pay

Question: Do you do any automatic bill-pay with your church accounts/recurring bills? With two signatures required on church accounts, is there was a way to handle that? For instance, our electric bill has 6 different accounts and we have had problems with the monies being applied incorrectly…Could an automatic bill pay option through our bank be another option to writing 6 checks?

Answer: We currently do not have any automatic payments. I think you may already be at the answer. Yes, two signatures are required. If you are willing to pay utilities via an automatic payment, then the two signatures would come at the signing of the agreement (which can be cancelled with some advance notice). This will free you from writing 6 checks, it will insure that the payments are applied correctly by the utility company, and it will allow you to code the payment in house. This is simply an ACH (auto-draft). It is different and separate from the online banking requirements put in place by ICFG last year.

Let me state the obvious. What you lose is flexibility with your payment timing. You will have to monitor cash flow near the monthly utility payment date.