About a year and a half ago, we began paying all my bills online. It's taken me that long btw, to even get the navigation of the site down pat. Whatever. Finally we got it all up and running and I've been cloud nine ever since.
The reason I REALLY wanted to do this was so that whenever tax time came around, the site would make life so easy for me since by the mere click of the mouse, it would spit out a report 1-2-3 of all the people to whom monies went. As well as total up all the monies spent in each of the categories I created. Or, I can get any OTHER sort of financial report I wanted. Yippee.
Okay. So that's easy enough. I can now know exactly how much I spent for the entire year on medical expenses, utilities, insurance policies, groceries, home maintenance, whatever. Naturally, I wouldn't even conSIDer looking at the tally for clothing or entertainment, btw... why ruin my day?? Talk about masochistic. Anyway, I can also spit out a report by Payees only or one of Payment History, etc. etc.. These reports are basically magical if you ask me.
In the meantime, I'd THEN be able to print out whatever information I wanted, to hand over to Alan, my CPA. Who should thank me plenty, btw, for doing the work HE should be calculating. Which is kinda funny given that in order to even take advantage of tax deductions, don't you first have to have an income of sorts? Oops.
Anywhoo.... all this online banking works perfectly fine as long as Bonnie is here each Monday, helping me to issue the online checks. BUT... only one glitch. What happens when Bonnie ISN'T here? As in: when she has her knee surgery sometime this Autumn. SHOOT ME NOW.
So a few weeks ago I came up with a solution. I decided NOW we'd have to actually set up hard core monthly automatic online DEBIT payments so I wouldn't even have to WORRY about my bills being paid if Bonnie and/or I aren't around. Don't ask. it was SOME freakin' task but sure enough we did everything we needed to do and bingo. We got everything lined up.
Big mistake. Turns out NOW, since the payments to everyone are automatically taken from my account by the different companies, yes I get an alert, BUT I no longer have the payments being tracked in my online banking reports! Thus, goodbye easy tax info! Or spending totals. Or anything. WTF??
Basically... only when you pay via the bank's website can I get a full report. If you set up the auto debit deal, you can't, since THOSE payments originate from the companies and not online bank itself. Therefore: OMG... I HAD TO NOW RETRACT MY AUTO DEBITING plan altogether! Turns out... the entire project was a fucking WASTE OF TIME. Geez...
Which of course meant: I then had to go BACK, get the hell out of auto debit and INSTEAD revert to online banking once again! But THIS time... I had to make everything a RECURRING PAYMENT for everyone. Which would THEN let me have all my reports correctly set up once again AND show up in my banking reports.
UH... CONFUSED?? Yeah, me too. What can I say. It's complicated to explain.
But, trust me... this works muuuuch better. It was crazy, but we did it. Of course that meant I also had to kind of estimate what each month's bill would be for everyone, but that was easy enough given the PAYMENT HISTORY tab. Water and Sewer? Approximately $40.00 per month. American Express?? Uh... approximately zillions.
Anyway... MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. We finished the project yesterday morning and man am I glad. I could even leave this heavenly earth altogether and STILL everyone would get paid. Forever, if they wanted. Kinda gives a whole new meaning to: working the Graveyard Shift.
....and talented!
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