Some thoughts on Bank of America’s billpay system:

• The list of cooperating companies is long and impressive. I was able to set up all my phone utilities last night in a matter of minutes.
• The signup process is easy and painless; it appears they have done some good thinking as far as finding out when the lead time is for payment of bills and made sure each partner specified this.
• One suggestion would be to have some kind of scheduling calendar set up, where visually-oriented people like me could see when the bills were due in a calendar table and step back a few days to schedule payment. Providing my paychecks arrive on time (a difficult proposition these days) I would like to schedule blocks of payments on one or two days a month after the deposit of funds in my account.
• Another suggestion is for BoA to have some kind of flag as a failsafe to send an email to you if your scheduled pay date arrives and there are insufficient funds to cover your payables; a trigger to advise you of deposits in your account, and a ‘successful’ message to advise you of your payments being made on time.

I know, it’s a lot to ask of a web app, but I see good things begun here and I’d like to see them get even better, so that the site becomes more of a smart appliance and less of a tool.