Cash RegisterWhen it comes to being orderly and efficient, I am a bit of a nut. And when it comes to paying bills, I am a bit obsessed.

When I get a bill in the mail, both for my business or my personal life - I have just about same process. With my business, I enter in the bills into my accounting system that day. 10 days prior to them being due, I get a reminder to pay them in my accounting system. I then typically (99% of my bills that are not on the credit card) login to my bank's bill pay system and schedule the payment to be paid on or before the date it is due. With my personal bills, I actually first use my bank's bill pay system and then enter the check as a line item in my Quicken file with the date being the date the check is sent out by my bank.

This lets me file the bill away immediately and not have to look at it again. That is unless the company I am paying has not set up their accounts receivables correctly.

There are some vendors I must pay several days in advance because I know they have checks sitting on their desk which they do not process the same day or even within two days. Since they do not process them right away, they get entered into their system a few days after they are due and I get a penalty of some sort. To avoid the phone calls to the vendor, I typically pay them a few days in advance so they have time to let the check sit on their desk the necessary waiting period. I think it is wrong and inefficient, but it is what I do to avoid phone calls and more wasted time.

I guess I should not judge.

Which leads me to another pet peeve. Why do some people feel that they are doing you a favor by paying your bills on time? If I do work for your and we agree to payment terms, pay it on time and that is it. Don't act like you are doing me a favor for paying me, when you owe that money. I don't feel like I am doing my vendors a favor by paying them what I agreed to pay them, on time. It is what I agreed to do in exchange for a service or product. Ehh, I am going off on a tangent, I can leave this for another blog post.