Dazed and consumed: A paperless mess?

Dazed and consumed: A paperless mess?

For someone like me who has the odd problem organising their paperwork you might think online paperless billing, now pushed heavily by our banks and utility companies, would be a godsend. For environmental reasons I'm all in favour of it; anything that saves a few trees from being flattened and shoved through my letter box has to be a good idea.

I've started swapping over some of my statements, but the biggest surprise to date has not been how convenient online billing is, but how much it blurs the lines of communication between service provider and bill payer.

Hello, what's that pinging noise coming from my inbox? It's my monthly email from the "BillingWebTeam" (that's Virgin Media to you), my home phone and broadband provider. Apparently, this month my bill works out at £24.53. ("Don't worry, you don't need to do anything, we'll collect the amount automatically," it advises. Phew, that's a weight off my mind.)

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But hang on. I'm on an £18.60 anytime tariff. I'd like to know how I ran up the extra £5.93. The problem is there is no link from the email to my statement. For that I have to trawl way back through my inbox and find the email I received when I signed up. Sure enough, this contains a link to Virgin Media's website.

One email address and password later (miraculously recalled first time) and I'm in. Hang on, no I'm not. It's a gateway page from which I have to click on the right option, after which I get ... exactly the same information as was contained in the original email.

Underneath there are three ambiguously labelled yellow buttons, one of which says "Show me this bill". That sounds like the right one to choose, but it just leads me to a screen displaying the same stuff with a line informing me, as I already know, that I have run up an extra £5.93 on my bill.

At the foot of the page there are three more yellow ­buttons, the last of which says "Show details". After what seems like ages, I find my bill, but the impression lingers that Virgin Media has not gone out of its way to make it easy for me.

Things went little better with my online O2 mobile phone bill. After numerous unsuccessful attempts to guess my username and password, I eventually phoned customer services in desperation. The man on the phone gave me temporary ones straight away. He wearily explained they have to deal with countless calls like this.

Why does any of this need to be so complicated? When someone clicks on a link to their bill, it's pretty obvious what sort of information they are expecting to access. And more worryingly, it's all too easy to see how this veil could be abused by surreptitious utility companies, some of whom, like nPower, already have reputations for confusing billing practices.

Is it just me, or do you find that online billing has made it harder for you to work out how much you are spending? Are some providers worse than others? And what could utility companies do to make them more user-friendly?

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2009