Migrating Bills into Cyberspace

There are a number of ways you can migrate your bills and the process of paying them into cyberspace. Of course, we don't do this migration just for its own sake (ok! some of us do), we want the change to make life better for us in some way. Reasonable goals to seek from the migration include the following.

1. money-time savings: If we can delay bill-paying till later, while still not incurring financial or social penalties resulting from late payment, we save money. This is because we gain the interest from the money while it is in our bank account. It also means that we have, until it is committed, greater freedom. So one advantage we might hope to gain from a digital bill-paying system is a means to either remind us to pay bills on the last possible day, or a mechanism to allow the payment of bills to be preset for the last possible day.
2. more integrated record-keeping: A good digital bill-paying system should allows to integrate different records of payments made, combining invoices and receipts with records of bank transactions. So a good payment system should allow us to coordinate and reconcile all the disparate information associated with making payments.
3. more secure record-keeping: One of the advantages of digital storage is that making multiple copies of information can be easily done. This allows backups to be readily created, and stored securely in, for example, a fire safe, a friend's house, or in a cloud. A disaster destroying records locally does not stop us from reconstituting our history from elsewhere. So an optimal bill-payment system lets us easily copy our records to somewhere safe, and also lets us easily restore our system from such copies.
4. immediate accounting: Related to point 2 above, a good system should allow the construction of various accounting reports immediately on information being provided to the system, such as by downloading a transaction list from a bank. Simple reports might include profit and loss accounts on the one hand and balance sheets on the other. So an optimal recording system should make it very easy for information to be projected into financial reports.
5. scanner friendly: Information still comes to us in paper format. We need an easy way to import that information from paper into the financial system. This will mean, at the very least, that we scan paper bills and receipts and store them as images. These images must be associated with the information which they record. Ideally, OCR would generate this information from the image of the document itself. The goal is to render the paper copy redundant. So the optimal system will allow paper-based information to be migrated into the system with a minimum of effort.

That's my thinking for tonight. Next time I write on this topic, I plan to outline the hardware and software of a system with the attributes being described above.