Last night, my son was having trouble convincing his college landlord that the Feb rent payment had been sent via online billpay. I was not happy, envisioning an extended conversation with bank customer service, something that is very, very low on my list of Monday night activities.
So I logged in to the Chase account to see if the check had cleared. At best, I expected to see that the payment had been sent via billpay, but no way to prove that the check had actually arrived.
Bit I was pleasantly surprised. Not only could I see that the payment had cleared, the bank had posted an image of the check so I could see the landlord’s endorsement (see screenshot 1 and 2).
That was great on its own. But wait, there was more.
The bank offers a self-service “Note to Payee” function that automatically creates a letter to document payment details, including a copy of the check image (see screenshot 3). All you have to do is download the PDF and attach it to an email to the payee.
The only hitch in the system is finding these functions. They are located under the Payments & Transfers tab (see screenshot 1). That’s not bad, but it would be more intuitive to place a direct link from the the online statement (My Accounts) to the bill payment details. Also, the “Print to PDF” button is easily missed (screenshot 2).
Still, the entire process took less than two minutes. And I didn’t have to call customer service, a saving of 15 minutes of my time and $15-20 in customer service expense by the bank.
The letter worked perfectly. Within an hour, the landlord had backed down, apologized for her error, and went back to her day job. This pretty much makes up for the unreadable bit of correspondence I got from the bank last week.
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1. Chase bill payment activity screen (14 Feb 2012)
2. Chase proof-of-payment screen
Note: Print to PDF option
3. Chase automatically generated “Note to Payee” letter in PDF format
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