TECHNOLOGY GetitKeepit.com – I don’t get it, yet

I just don’t get it


Technology
Fergus Kelly

GetitKeepit.com
It sounds like a brilliant idea: All your utility bills in one place online for easy access and viewing. And it’s a brand new Irish site so I decided to give it a go.
After a tediously long sign-up process involving passphrases and texts to your phone and PINs and suchlike (yes, it’s pretty secure, but it takes ages), you are presented with a list of bills that can be accessed: Vodafone, Eircom, O2, Meteor, 3, Bord GΡis, Airtricity, Bord GΡis Electricity, Sky (not currently available – the website claims availability “in the next couple of weeks” … so why show it?), UPC (otherwise known as Chorus/NTL). Waste companies Oxegen, Green Star and Panda are listed but do not offer online billing – even more pointless than Sky. At this point you are told that if you haven’t set up online billing with each account you have to register for that service with each provider. Spend another half an hour doing this.
Now, go back to GetitKeepit.com and see what’s there. Nothing. Nothing at all. Because I’ve just signed up for online billing (I’d never been able to find it on the absolutely awful O2 site before), it took a fair while before I could see any bills.
Eventually the site imported my data. The excellent graph function clearly showed when I was in England and spending a fortune on O2’s ridiculously expensive data roaming.
You can organise reminders for when bills have to be paid. It also claims to give you a ‘Smart Postbox’ for storing important emails. You just forward on the email to a specific address. I’m just not sure how useful this is. I’m fairly happy with the quality of Gmail (though I would have my doubts with eircom, their site partner).
A basic account is free, the ‘Silver’ version offers ten virtual PO Box Sheets per month (I’ve no idea what this means) plus SMS alerts for your reminders. At €7.99 per month it’s not cheap. The “Gold” version adds another ten virtual PO Box Sheets per month for a further €7. I wish they’d tell me in simple terms what I’m getting for the cash.
All in all, GetitKeepit.com is a handy site, but I’m not sure how handy. No doubt it will improve over time, but, right now, I wouldn’t be rushing to get out the laptop to sign up.


UPDATE - Tuesday, March 9, 2010

GetitKeepit.com to improve their offering

I was contacted by GetitKeepit.com after they read my review and they wanted me to clarify some points, which I’m happy to do.
The basic service is free. The Silver and Gold packages do have a cost, but for the money they’ll scan your paper documents and upload them to your account. For €7.99, the website will scan ten pages per month, and for €14.99 it will do 20. I’m glad this has been cleared up.
GetitKeepit.com is already making changes to its signup process to speed the registration with the site – shorter passphrases will be available and email addresses will be usable usernames. This change should be live in the next few days. It also plans to use cookie technology to remember you on the site to make subsequent logins faster and easier.
I’ve been assured that a clearer ‘Coming soon’ graphic will be added to services (for example, Sky) that are not yet available.
I’ll keep an eye out.

I’m glad that GetitKeepit.com showed such interest in my feedback and that they responded so quickly to my concerns. If more websites showed such speed of response to consumer concerns, the web would be a much happier and simpler place to do business. FK