You may already be accustomed to visiting your bank's Web site or a portal like Yahoo! to pay some of your bills with a few simple clicks. Although definitely convenient, there are few services that will take all of your bill paying off your hands. Do-it-all bill aggregators offer you a complete escape from the drudgework of writing those checks each month.

These services receive and process all your bills, both paper and electronic, each month according to your specifications.

You start this new arrangement by changing your billing address so your bills, both paper and electronic, are sent straight to your aggregator. These Web-based services display your bills online (paper bills are scanned and are ready for you to view at your password-protected area of the site).

You can either have your bills paid automatically or opt to give the go ahead each month. You can also give the order to pay your bills automatically only if they are under a certain amount and have e-mail notifications sent daily as the due dates of your bills draw near.

A bill aggregator such as PayTrust (www.paytrust.com) caters more and more to small businesses. They offer features such as the ability to download information to your accounting software as well as a year-end CD-ROM summarizing your records. You also get top-rate 24/7 customer support.

Whether your service handwrites checks or pays electronically, a bill aggregator must dip into your bank account to make those payments. And naturally, giving out your bank account information may justifiably cause some hesitation on your part.

So even if an aggregator claims to be storing your personal info on a secure server, you're going to want some legal guarantees in the event of a screwup on their part.

For example, PayTrust and PayMyBills customers are protected against unauthorized transactions up to $100,000 by Travelers Insurance Group Safeweb program, and CyberBills agrees to refund you twice the amount of any loss to you for a mistake on their part. A good service will also agree in your contract to cover any late fees they may accidentally cause.

Pricing is currently consistent among the three leading services. Small business services typically cost $19.95 per month. This fee includes 30 transactions (a transaction, in this case, is a paid bill.) for CyberBills and 40 transactions for Paytrust and PayMyBills. Each additional transaction is 75 cents. You have to compare this not just to the cost of a stamp for each of your bills, but more importantly to the aggravation and the time it takes to process all the bills yourself each month.

So the next time you receive your bills, organize them, open them, write checks, stamp them, find a mailbox, and hope that you didn't get a late fee . remember that there's an alternative. It may cost you some money, but it could save some of your sanity.

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