Bill Pay

You may make bill payments through Bill Pay to any business, person or professional that has an address we can verify. Within Bill Pay, these are called “Payees”.

Bill payments may be made only to Payees with a U. S. payment address. Bill payments will be sent to a Payee either electronically or by a paper check mailed to the Payee via the U.S. Postal Service.

If you have any questions concerning a Bill Pay transaction, call (855) 877-4165 to reach the Bill Pay Member Service. Spirit of Alaska Member Service Representatives do not have access to your Bill Pay transaction information until it clears your account. Consequently, they do not have the ability to cancel payments, adjust payment dates, or make any other changes to your Bill Pay transactions. CheckFree, our Bill Pay provider, adheres to specific service standards when providing Customer Service.

It is a good idea to contact a company before you define that company as a payee. Some companies—including some credit card companies—require that you send a payment to a special address when you are using an online bill payment service. Some companies also require extra time to process a payment that is not accompanied by a portion of your statement. Be sure to ask the company:

• “Is a special address required for checks issued from an online payment system, or should I use the address that is included with my invoice?” If a special address is required, then be sure to enter this special address as the payee address in the e-Teller service.
• “Is any extra time required to process a payment that comes in without a portion of my statement? If so, how much extra time is required?” If extra time is required, then be sure to allow for that extra time when you make a payment using the e-Teller service. One question the company may ask you in return is: “Will your account number appear on the check?” The answer to this question is: “Yes.”

Click on the “Pay Bills” in the main e-Teller navigation.

Make sure the company or person that you are going to pay is on your Payee List.

When you use Bill Pay, the company or person that you are going to pay is called a “payee”. You can define a payee yourself using the Add Payee function. Each payee that you have selected or defined appears on your Payee List.

Create a payment to the payee

This is like writing a check to the payee. You can choose to set up payments as recurring (bills that are the same amount every month) or set them up as one-time.

These two steps are described in more detail in the following questions and answers.

Bill Pay has a tutorial to guide you through the process. It’s located on the Add Payee page.

To make a payment to a payee, follow these steps:

• Enter your Sign-On ID and password to log in to the e-Teller service. This will take you to the Accounts Overview page.
• Click on “Pay Bills” at the top of the main page; This is where you access Bill Pay.
• Within Bill Pay is a row of navigation links. Click on the Payments link and choose the option that is appropriate to you. Complete the required information. It is important you have a recent copy of the paper bill to refer to for things like the correct address and your account number.
• You will know that your payment has been processed when you see a status of “Processed” in the payment entry on the Payment List. Payment information cannot be modified after the payment has been processed.

No. Once you define a payee, Bill Pay remembers all the information about that payee. When you want to pay them again, choose them from your list of payees and input the amount to be paid and the date to pay. Then, click Submit.

You can pay a person or company even if you do not have an account with them. When you add new payees, you will probably find that the payees fall into one of two categories:

• Companies with Whom You Have an Account: One of the required fields for a payee is the Account #. For companies like the phone company, or a utility, your bill shows your account number with that company. When you add a payee for the phone company, for example, you should put your phone company account number in the Account # field. This ensures that your phone company account number will appear on all checks to the phone company.
• People or Companies With Whom You Do Not Have an Account: In some cases, you will want to pay someone, but you do not have an account with that person or company. In these cases, you will need to put something in the Account # field in order to tell the payee what the check is for. In situations like this, where you do not have an actual account with a payee, you can think of the Account # field as a “message” field. For example, you might enter the text “Rent – 1 Main St. Apt 12” for a payment to your landlord. If you went for an eye examination and wanted to pay the doctor, you could enter “Eye Exam 1/31/2000” in the Account # field.
  • Please note that whatever you put in the Payee Account # field will appear on the check.

Almost all your payments will be one-time payments. You should only use a recurring payment when you are paying someone the same amount every period. For example, you could set up your mortgage payment as a recurring payment, because the amount of the payment is the same every month. Other payments—like your phone bill or your gas bill—occur every month, but the amount you pay is different from one month to the next. These payments should be made each month as one-time payments.

Choose Recurring Payment from the Payments menu; and click on the “Show me how” link. You must set the number of payments to a value greater than 1 in order for Bill Pay to schedule multiple payments.

To stop payment on a check you have manually written, you must call us at (907) 459-5900 or (800) 478-1949 or send us a secure message from e-Teller. To stop payment on an online bill payment, you must call Bill Pay Support at (866) 875-6807.

Let’s assume for a moment that you pay a bill the traditional way: you write a check, place it in an envelope, and mail the check to a payee. If the payee does not receive the check, the payee either notes that fact on your next invoice, or contacts you to inquire about the missing payment. Online bill payment works the same way. Processed payments appear on your online Statement, and on the account statement that you receive in the mail, but there is currently no verification that a payee has received an online bill payment.

This still leaves us with the question: “How do I know a payment was sent to a payee?” If a payment cannot be made because you did not have sufficient funds in your account, the payment will be cancelled. You will receive a message in your Bill Pay Mailbox informing you of that the payment was cancelled. If the payment was made, you will notice the withdrawal in your Register for the account from which you paid the bill.

It is important to monitor the payments that you make, both one-time payments and recurring. If you see a payment that is not processed on the assigned processing date, first look to see if you have sufficient funds to cover the payment. If you do have sufficient funds, and you believe the payment should have been processed, call Bill Pay Support at (866) 875-6807 and we will be happy to help you.

If you scheduled a bill to be paid through Bill Pay and the transaction has not been posted to your account by the specified date, please contact iPay Customer Care Center directly at (866) 321-7048 between the hours of 7:30 PM to 8:30 PM ET, Monday through Friday.