A few readers e-mailed me to let me know that bill management website Manilla.com announced that they will be shutting down. Surprising, as they were just mentioned in Money magazine last month!
Manilla will be closing on July 1, 2014. This was a hard decision given that, over the past three years, Manilla has won many awards […] but was unable to achieve the scale necessary to make the economics of the business viable.
As noted in my now-useless Manilla review, many people enjoyed having all of their bills located in a central place. It was also nice that they offered to store all your old bills forever… or in this case September 30, 2014 after which they will be destroyed.
What are good Manilla alternatives? Here are several services that offer similar features in no particular order, please feel free to add more in the comments. I haven’t gotten to try them all out yet, so share your experiences as well.
- Finovera – “Our mission is to make the process of receiving, managing, paying and organizing household bills and documents simple, automatic and effortless.”
- Enfold – “Enfold is a free-for-life virtual filing cabinet where you can safely store and organize all your important documents and account information.”
- MoneyStream – “Not just an organizer or bill-payer, MoneyStream brings everything together in one secure place—and then shows you a future view of your money so you can see at a glance where you stand and where you’re going.”
- Check (formerly PageOnce) – A free smartphone app that both organizes and tracks balances, with the added feature of letting you pay your bills through the app. I don’t think it stores past statements past a certain time period.
- Mint – Owned by Intuit, Mint is more budget-centric and tracks all of your transactions. You can’t pay bills through the software (although it will send you bill reminders) and it doesn’t store actual monthly statements.
- Mobilligy – “Mobilligy puts all of your bills in one app that lets you review, manage and pay your bills for free – anytime, anywhere.”
- FileThis – “FileThis is like a personal assistant for your paperwork. It automatically collects, files, tags, and organizes your online documents in a digital filing cabinet. Never lose another bank statement, legal paper, tax form, insurance document, or other important piece of paperwork.”
- Doxo – “All your provider accounts and information together at last. Back up all your critical documents automatically to your personal cloud storage. Receive and pay bills from connected providers with doxoPAY.”
- Personal Capital – similar account aggregation focus as Mint, plus some investment portfolio analysis features.
- Zumbox – “Your postal mail delivered online. Your documents stored securely, forever.”
- Intuit Paytrust = “PayTrust’s all-in-one online bill pay allows you to easily receive, track, and pay all your bills online.”
- MyCheckFree – “Receive and pay your e-bills at one easy, secure location.”
- Yodlee Labs – “This is a site where Yodlee will launch (and test) all of its latest (account aggregation) products before they are launched anywhere else in market.” If you just want most recent, most-refined version, sign up at Yodlee Moneycenter.
With Manilla and Everpix, I am reminded that any offer to store your stuff “forever” really means “as long as we keep making enough money”. Personally, I’m still using my bank’s Online Billpay service along with AutoPay with credit card where possible. For archival purposes, I download any paperless bills in PDF format to a folder on my computer, which is automatically backed up daily to my external hard drive and also instantly synchronized with my free Dropbox.com cloud account. However, if I can truly view and pay all my bills in one simple mobile app and a few taps, I’d be up for that.
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I used it think it’s important to save things forever. Pick also used to scan every bill for years and years. The. I realized. What’s the point? Once it’s paid do I really need that phone bill or the car lease statement?
So I stopped doing it a number of years ago and I have not lookd back. The banks and merchants keep the stuff for a few years anyway!
I agree on things like utility bills past a year or so to see any trends like water leaks or increase in electricity usage, although many already provide that info on the monthly statement. Anything tax-related is good to keep indefinitely though, esp business stuff.
There’s only one bill management website I know of that truly will handle all bills – including old school paper style ones – http://paytrust.intuit.com/index.jsp – it’s not free, but you get a PO box, and can have any paper bill sent there as well as it connecting to all the standard online stuff. They scan in any paper bills.
it’s been a lifesaver – and predates pretty much everything you could possibly think of as I know I’ve been using it myself continuously for more than a decade now.
It’s funny how “pay a small amount every month” means the business actually stays in business:)
They only keep bills available online for 2 years I think, although the summary detail (amount/due date/when paid) is available forever.
@stephen – yeah I went through the same thing…who cares;-)
Thanks for the suggestion, not familiar with Paytrust.
I’ve used paytrust since 2000…it was formerly PayMyBills, eTradeBills and maybe a couple more. Its a good service. They scan paper bills and present them electronically as well as handle ebills.
With intuits acquisition of Check, I am thinking they probably don’t want to support two services so we’ll see.
I do like Paytrust.
I really don’t understand the fascination financial columnists have with Mint.
After five years – and some unresolved issues going back more than three years – I finally wiped out all my information in my Mint account and changed the passwords on those accounts feeding my Mint account a few weeks ago. And these were on-going issues that included working with their tech support the entire time – they just could not fix them.
Then in started to bleed over into the basic account tracking areas, where I had to change transaction information on multiple transactions weekly (and some transaction categories disappeared entirely, so the history was then mucked up) and re-establish connection to accounts frequently.
Look at their user forums – it is loaded with issues, many going back years (with continued discussion, including Mint tech support). I just finally felt that I needed to close assess to my accounts and move on.
What could have been an entry to Quicken products put me off to Quicken.
I agree there are ongoing sync issues, but I don’t know of anything better for account aggregation than some old legacy Yodlee. For a while Yodlee got awfully bloated and slow, maybe now they are better again.
YNAB @ YouNeedABudget.com
I was really sad to get that email. I’d been paying electronically for years before Manilla. However, Manilla, which I discovered through your blog, was what convinced me to go paperless on all my accounts. It was easy to log into Manilla every month or two and download all PDFs to my encrypted drive for storage and never have to use the file cabinet anymore.
Thanks Jonathan for the list in this post. One other service that you didn’t list but is very similar to Manilla in what it does is Zumbox.com. I had been using Zumbox just for my utilty bills because Manilla wasn’t collecting PDFs for my electric or gas. Now, I’ll have to see if Zumbox will work with all the other stuff Manilla was collecting PDFs for.
Thanks Dan, will add Zumbox.
Zumbox is shuttering their operations too!
http://blog.infotrends.com/?p=14891
Thilak, thank you for that link. That’s weird though – not only have I never received a notification from Zumbox that they’re closing, but they’re support staff is currently e-mailing me back and forth about a question I had and haven’t said a thing about closing up shop. Furthermore, you can still click “Open Your Box” to start a new account at http://zumbox.com . I’m suspicious that the article you linked may have been premature.
I use mycheckfree.com to receive and store several bills (electric, gas, phone). This site also appears to allow online billy pay but I do not use that feature since I have payments for these bills automated. One drawback is that you can only receive bills from participating billers, though the list of participating billers is long. The company behind mycheckfree.com, Fiserv, provides bill-receiving services through many banks and credit unions. Before I discovered mycheckfree.com I was keeping a Bank of America checking account alive only for the Fiserv bill-receiving feature B of A offered. Unfortunately, my primary financial institutions do not offer this.
Thanks Ryan, will add mycheckfree.
Actually, check out FileThis:
https://filethis.com/invited-by-a-friend?token=G6mC3XWhBH3uO7NubKCo2w%3D%3D
I never used Manilla because I never liked that they forced me to turn off my paper option. FileThis actually fetches your PDF statements for you automatically (you can turn off paper if you want, but it’s not a requirement). It’s not a true Manilla replacement because you can’t do bill pays in there, but I personally never needed that feature…
I really like FileThis…
Yodlee Labs money manager is very similar. I have used it for a while but had also started using Manilla which I liked better, sorry to see it go. You can still get snail mail statements. I like to be able to look ahead and see what’s due down the road. Yodlee’s dashboard also shows recent charges on my credit cards.
Thanks Cindy, will add Yodlee Labs (formerly MoneyCenter).
Hi Dan, thanks for including us in your review, we’ve had a lot of Manilla users switching to our service and so far the feedback is great. We just released a Manilla conversion utility that automatically pulls over your accounts, documents, and reminders for you. We’ve converted some users so far with hundreds of documents so we feel good that we’re saving people a lot of work by doing it automatically. If you want to check it out just create an account and then click the “Manilla importer” banner. http://www.moneystream.com.
Thanks Gillian for the info about the Manilla importer.
Is there a money stream app for iPhone? I can’t locate it if there is. The convenience of having Manilla in an app was a awesome.
Hi Cheri, just wanted to let you know we’ve released the My MoneyStream iphone app, now available in the App Store!
But does Moneystream have Auto login like Manilla? Logins to all websites so you dont have to mess with passwords.
Does MoneyStream have an iPhone app like Manilla?
Thanks Gillian, just transitioned from Manilla to MoneyStream. It looks great so far.
But does anyone have AUTO LOGIN like Manilla!!..:( So sad i have not seen it on any other bill site.
I like to pay my bills on the actual companies website ie AT&T.
O loooooved that Manilla Auto Logged me in to the Bill website ie At&t and i did not have to put in password and all that on every site evry single time i wanted to go to that site. Please let me know if anyone is doing that..:)
thanks!!
Finovera has an autologin function
Now that’s really surprising. Manilla was one of the best. Anyway, those are great alternatives. Thanks!
I got psyched to use filethis.com as my Manilla replacement after reading this blog and noticing on their website they collected PDFs from some providers that Manilla does not (like Chase.) However, when I registered for an account on filethis.com, I got a big disappointment: The entire website is Flash. My initial reaction is I don’t think I can trust a company with all my passwords that, in 2014, has made the decision to design a sensitive website in Flash. I’m glad this blog post has a good list of alternatives.
I used Manilla mostly to collect my PDF statements in one place, and a lot of the alternatives listed above don’t do that. (I separately use Personal Capital for account aggregation, and that suits me fine for that purpose.)
I tried several sites listed above and came to the conclusion that, for anyone else who similarly is focusing on the PDF-collection/going-paperless aspect, I heartily recommend Finovera. It actually collects PDF statements for more my accounts than Manilla did, and I like their interface better too. And, unlike at least one of the other options, the website is not based on Flash.
From what I understand, Finovera makes money both from billers who pay them for helping their customers go paperless as well as banks and other institutions that license it’s use on their websites (latter part sounds similar to Yodlee.) I hope they’re profitable and stick around longer than Manilla did. Thanks again for posting this list, Jonathan.
I just started using Manilla about 7 months ago!! It has helped me and my “new-ish” live-in boyfriend pay all our bills on time. He recently moved in to my place, so therefore a majority of our bills are were already in my name. Also, we are both new parents to a beautiful little girl and I was finding it hard to juggling being a new mom, organizing our new finances and especially every month giving him username/passwords to each and every acct. It was just an extra chore that I was sick and tired of. So, in December, I left all the finance decisions for my partner to handle when I found Manilla. Manilla allowed me to wipe my hands clean answering annoying questions every month, such as “when is this due?” “what’s the acct info for this?” It literally took the “financial drama” out of our relationship. Manilla, allowed me to link him to my acct’s, which gets him the information he needed without waiting for me to research it. Also, I loved how I’d get alerts when something was paid, Manilla, gave us the peace of mind knowing that bills were paid and accounted for. I’m completely bummed out that they are closing, and have to now shop around for a replacement. I’ve been unsuccessfully looking for a replacement that offers the same capabilities, especially the linking feature, but I haven’t found one. Any suggestions? I’m over downloading app’s only to find that it’s not what I’m looking for. Thanks in advance!! ~Valencia 🙂
I’ve been using Manilla for about 2 years now. I am so upset and disappointed that it will be closing down as I rely on it too much! I tried Mint but it is too complicated for me. Then I tried to use Moneystream, which is almost similar to Manilla but I personally do not like it as it doesn’t pick up the amount of bill I have to pay for the month and somehow, it picks up random due date for it and even if I already marked the bill as paid it still says I still have to pay for it after a couple of days… I am currently looking for something else that will be just like Manilla. I wish the makers of it will just keep the company and even if I have to subscribe with a monthly fee. Now, I’m afraid that my bills will be late!
I am soooooooooo sad too!. i just went to Finovera and i paid a bill yesterday and is updated on the original site At&t but Finovera shows old info from before i paid even thought it says it was just verified today. I feel like i can trust it. Manilla pls dont close!
O and i loved Manilla’s Auto login, no other service seems to have Auto login to your bill’s websites. i hate putting in passwords every time i want to go to all my accounts. very sad..:(
Tried paytrust, very cumbersome and not user friendly.
I was sick about Manilla closing. I tried Moneystream which is not anything like Manilla. It just takes your bank bill pay information and organizes it. That would be a nice thing to have, but all I really want is to have all my bills in one place with alerts to let me know when they are due. I tried Finovera which is very similar to manilla, although it is more complicated and difficult to navigate. I’m going to give it a chance, but if I can find something more like Manilla, I will definitely go for that.
MANILLA! COME BACK!!!!!
iQabinet also offers a pretty good service for Manilla users. Check out this blog entry: https://www.iqabinet.com/2014/08/04/welcome-manilla-users/
I used to use paytrust in the late 90’s through early 2000’s. They were a very reliable service, and I saved far more in late fees than I ever paid them. However, after I moved to Canada gradually I cancelled all my US charge cards and such, so I no longer needed them. Now, I’m looking for something to help my mother in the US manage her bills. I see she has a $100 charge on a credit card she has been paying off now for about 6 months at $25 a month and currently owes $125… The statement looks like an advertisement, so she normally only realizes she owes a payment when the send a late payment notice, and tack on a $40 late fee.
Since I live in Canada, I need something like paytrust to scan in the bills so I can review them with her on the phone. She has a bill pay through her bank, but it only has ebilling available for a few of the bills, and to actually view the bills it takes you to a link to login to those websites. Even with lastpass, that is too many steps… So I’m inclined to sign her up with paytrust, but I see some people are reporting it has gone down hill and will do things like suddenly stop receiving some of the bills without notifying people. Is this a service that will help her, or just add one more source of errors paying bills? If it is the later, are there other good alternatives?