Document Command – How does it work?

Personal,Products by Dave Naffziger on November 22, 2006 at 2:47 pm

I love my Paytrust account, at least I used to. At some point along the many acquisitions of what was once PayMyBills, Paytrust stopped focusing on their customers. They originally provided me a very valuable service that created value along two dimensions:

Received & Archived bills (I didn’t have to change my mailing address with my biller)
Automated payment of bills

Recently, Paytrust has made be choose between the two. If a biller offers an ‘ebill’ through their website, Paytrust will not allow you to automate payment. This is irrespective of the fact that the ebill provides less data – for example a cell phone bill without the call records. I’m eager to move off of Paytrust, but changing all of my billing relationships will be a royal pain.

So, I was pretty excited to hear about Document Command on TechCrunch. Unfortunately, details of how you set up the service are noticeably missing in both the TechCrunch post and the Document Command web site. PayMyBills handled this very well – they notified your billers, gave you change my address letters and wallet sized cards. I sent Document Command a note looking for more info – we’ll see what they say.

Comments (2)

http://www.remotecontrolmail.com mdmiles

On-line followup:
Document Command is the name of the company that provides the Remote Control Mail service that you mention. More info is at http://www.remotecontrolmail.com of course, including pricing and FAQs on signup and the necessary USPS form.

In short, your physical mail (not just bills but anything you want remote access to) is received, the outside of the envelope is scanned, you as a recipient are identified by the address, and the image is presented in a secure web browser environment. You then have the choices of: scan the contents to PDF; forward ship the item to any address with delivery by major carriers; archive the piece at our facility; recycle the piece; or shred the piece. Once scanned, most users simply save the PDF to their local computer and either archive or recycle the physical item.

A modified pricing structure was just released that allows for bundled services instead of only the ala carte pricing offered earlier.

The service is scalable so individuals, home-based businesses, or larger enterprises can utilize the service which makes it simple to have a central address if employees are remote or always travelling.

I hope this helps explain a bit more, as with most things, there is a lot to cover and things like security, disaster recovery, etc can take another several paragraphs to cover. I suggest reading the FAQs for more detail first.
http://www.naffziger.net davenaff

Here is more detailed information that DC’s support sent me:

http://www.remotecontrolmail.com/redirecting-mail.php

I will say that the pricing model strikes me as overly complex. It isn’t quite clear to me what I’m going to be charged. I’m going to give this a try and see how it works.

I’m strongly considering signing up.

Dave Naffziger’s Blog

Document Command – How does it work?

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