Tips for Businesses Sending Paperless Bills and Statements

TL;DR The tips are, use Letter or A4 paper sizes, make the PDFs easy to find, provide at least two years' worth, use practical filenames for downloaded PDFs, and make PDFs easy to download.

Many companies are encouraging their end customers to switch to paperless bills and statements. Paperless customers like paperless because they can access the statements from anywhere and more quickly, and it's better for the environment.

However, existing paperless solutions have issues. A survey showed the top three issues are as follows:

• Having to log in to each company each month to access the bill or statement.
• Navigating each company's website is different, some of which are cumbersome.
• The email notification that a new e-bill or e-statement is ready gets lost in the inbox or the spam folder.

The following are tips that companies could follow to improve the paperless customer experience.

Use Letter or A4 Size Paper

Format the bill or statement to fit, if it were to be printed, on Letter size (8.5 x 11 inches) paper. (Or A4 which is used in many areas internationally.)

Formatting it to fit on Legal size (8.5 x 14 inches) creates complications for customers who need to download it and print it on their own printer. Most people will not have Legal size paper to put in their home printer. While there are ways to shrink a Legal-formatted PDF to print on Letter paper, extra steps are often required, steps that may be complicated for many home users.

Make the Bills and Statements Easy to Find

Ideally, after one logs into their account, it should be at most one or two clicks to get to a page with the list of current and past bills and statements. From there, the customer can click on one to view and/or download it.

For one of my online accounts, it is at least 6 clicks, and that is assuming I remember which six clicks are the correct ones. And getting to the bill page also included some scrolling down the page to get to the right spot to click. When I get there, it only shows the current bill. There is no indication of how to access past bills. In this case, the trick was to click on the bill's date which would then pull up a list of available bills. There is no visual indication that this was a clickable box or dropdown menu.

Sort the list of bills with the most recent one on top, oldest on the bottom of the list.

Provide at Least Two Years of History

Most companies only make the past 12 months of bills and statements available. One person complained to me that he sat down to do his taxes in February, went online to get the bank statement for January of the previous year, and it was already gone.

Make at least two years of bills and statements available.

Use Practical Filenames for Downloaded PDF Files

When customers wish to download a PDF file, a Save As dialog box allows them to select a folder and filename. (At least on Windows.) A default filename is given, such as statement.pdf. Downloading the next month's file then creates a naming conflict, which causes the name to be statement (1).pdf (in Windows.) Then (2), (3), and so on. After a year's worth is downloaded, which statement corresponds to which month?

Another company may use a different default name, such as MyBill.pdf. Or another company that also uses statement.pdf, would now have statement (12).pdf, (13), (14), and so on.

Some companies use some apparently random number, even GUIDs, such as this one, 670f8f72-ca4c-470e-88d6-7d01658b389d.pdf.

This behavior forces the customer to take control of filenames, replacing statement.pdf with something logical, such as PiggyBank_2021-06-15.pdf.

Make the default filename follow this pattern, CompanyName_YYMMDD.pdf, where YYMMDD is the statement date, not the day the file is being downloaded. If all companies followed this pattern, then all the downloaded bills and statements in the Downloads folder would be sorted by company and by date.

If the filename is part of the URL, do not include spaces in the name. Spaces get changed to %20. For example, Company Name would become Company%20Name. Make it either Company-Name or CompanyName.

Make it Easy to Download the PDFs

I have come across cases where downloading a PDF file is a multi-click, cumbersome process.

I have also seen some where the company presents a web page, but no PDF file. From the web page, there may be a Print button and it brings up the print dialog box to print it on paper. If I want the PDF, I have to change the printer destination from my printer to a PDF printer. Then push Print, which brings up a dialog box to specify folder and filename.

Clicking on the bill's view link should pull up the PDF in a standard PDF viewer allowing the customer to view the bill. The viewer should have a standard download button which should bring up the Save As dialog box (with a practical filename.)

If a separate download link is provided in the list of past bills, clicking on a bill's download link should bring up the Save As dialog box with a practical filename. Save. Done. Next bill. Save. Done. Etc.

Following these tips will improve the customer experience for paperless customers.

I've also written a corresponding article discussing tips for paper bills and statements.

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