Wednesday, January 20, 2010

BoA Nickname Payees Greasemonkey Script

Bank of America does not let you create "nicknames" for your payees on its Quickpay online billpay webpage. This means that if you have more than 1 account with the same entity, or different individuals with the same bank, it is very hard to tell your payees apart when you go to make a payment. This can result you sending a payment to the wrong payee.

You may end up with identical looking payees if you pay utility bills to the same company for more than 1 address, or if you frequently send money to family members who use the same bank as each other. In these cases, the way BoA's Quickpay page is now, you would have to memorize which account number goes with which payee in order to tell them apart and make a payment to the right person. See the screenshot below for how confusing it is:



In the screenshot above, the first "BANK OF AMERICA CHECKING" in the payee list is for one person, and the second one is for someone else, who also happens to bank at BoA. I wrote this Greasemonkey User Script in order to let people who use the BoA billpay create useful nicknames for these payees, since the BoA system doesn't allow it.

After you install the Greasemonkey script, you'll be able to create and edit nicknames for your payees by clicking the link to "create nickname" or by clicking the nickname to edit if you already created one. All other items display on the QuickPay page as usual. After you've made some nicknames, the billpay screen will look like this:



Now you can tell your payees apart without having to remember which account number is which.

Here is the script:


You can also download it from https://gist.github.com/3272964

Sunday, January 03, 2010

Thinking about using itshidden.com

I was thinking of using the anonymous VPN service from itshidden.com. I was even thinking of paying for it, despite not knowing the reliability or trustworthiness of those on the other end. So I signed up and got this:



So, just nevermind.