The ability to pay bills online is just another way that banks have found to make money by offering you solutions to problems that you didn't know you had.

There is a major movement afoot in offering everyday consumers like us the convenience of being able to pay bills online with the click of a mouse. New online services that banks are offering promise to rid you of the hassle of writing checks, recording them, stuffing, stamping and mailing them, and then keeping an eye on your account so they don't go boing. Those same banks are also betting that companies are getting sick of sending those bills out to you.

They're playing the odds that you'll grab the opportunity to receive and pay bills online.

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The banks that enable you to pay bills online share some common methods: You log on to a secure Web page and with a couple of clicks you pay your bills online, either by electronic transfer or by telling your bill-paying service to write and send a paper check. Be careful here, and don't assume that all of these services are the same:

• Some banks offer allow you to pay bills online.
• Some third-party companies enable you to pay bills via their Web sites, acting as intermediaries between billing companies and banks.
• With some of these organizations you continue to have bills mailed to your home; with others, bills are sent directly to your bill-paying service.
• Some companies charge for the service and some are free, as part of your membership.
• Since the ability to pay bills online is still a fairly new service, be careful that the service that works best for you now might not be the best choice a few months from now. Keep that in mind whether you choose to pay bills online now or decide to wait.

The basic procedure, if you want to pay bills online, is that your bills are sent to a processing website, where they are scanned and posted on a private section of the site. When you log on with your password, you can look at what essentially are pictures of your bills, then pay them. The bills are archived on the site, so you can check back later to see how well you've done with your newly-found power to pay bills online.

• You change your billing address to a company that receives your bills in the mail, scans them and posts images of them on its Web site. You pay the bills online. Other than these specific bills, you can also pay bills online via this site, even to individuals such as your butler, gardener, or babysitter. If the recipient doesn't accept electronic payments (that chauffer of yours, for example), the service will send a paper check. The leaders in this type of online bill-paying are companies such as Paytrust, PayMyBills.com and StatusFactory.
• You will still get most of your bills in the mail, but you may choose to receive some bills electronically. You enroll with a company that lets you pay all of these bills through its Web site. The company will send a check if the billing company doesn't take electronic payments. Leaders of this type of service include Checkfree, Quicken, Yahoo Bill Pay and First Union.
• You sign up for a service that allows you to pay bills online, but only to a select set of companies that send you electronic bills. You can't pay individuals or companies that aren't on the list. You continue to pay them directly, the way you always have (like when you slip Jeeves an extra $50 for reminding the maids to alphabetize all the books in your private library, for example). Leaders of this type of service include TransPoint, Microsoft Money Central and Citibank.

Admittedly, it's a lot more convenient to pay bills online than to stand in line, but these services don't take away all of the hassles of bill-paying. For example, you can't wait until the payment due date to pay bills online, or you risk being assessed a late payment. In fact, many of these services require that if you want to pay bills online you must have the payment in place five working days before it's due.

Most of us don't separate banking and bill-paying. To us, it's all money.

The people who support the movement to pay bills online stress the convenience of it. Most services allow you to set it up so that when you pay bills online, it synchronizes with the Quicken or Microsoft Money software that you may have in your computer. You don't have to lick envelopes, pay postage or find a mailbox. If you are away from home for long periods, it's nice to be able to view your account and pay bills online hassle-free.

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The most popular places to pay bills online, such as banks, Checkfree and Transpoint, don't make you change your billing addresses. Most of them have agreements with a few companies, such as utilities, that offer electronic billing, so you can choose not to get bills in the mail from those companies.

As the industry goes through rapid changes, you can be confident that the service you sign up for today will improve immensely within six months. Online billing is just another cultural change brought about by computers. Of all the companies that enable you to pay bills online, which ones do I think will dominate the market over time? Well, like the computer industry itself, it's anybody's guess. However, if I was a betting person, my money would be on the banks.