Paying invoices by Electronic Bank Transfer

[ddstretch]

I am in the middle of a potential small problem paying one of the two invoices I was sent (on two successive days), and I wonder of I could suggest a small change to some instructions or some procedures that might clarify matters a little?

I chose to pay to renew my hosting service from eukhost by Electronic bank Transfer for a number of reasons. One recent reason is that I cannot log onto the specific accounts part of eukhost, and a request I put in to forward my password to me has yet to yield any automatic email that I expected and told would arrive.

So, I emailed eukhost and asked if it was all right to pay by electronic bank transfer, which I had used last year. I was told that I could, but that I had to also send them a "scanned receipt" from the bank to forward to the billing department so they could make the necessary changes to the invoice to mark it as paid. This was a little surprising, as I did not have to do this last year, when I merely told them my account details, and that I had given the invoice reference number as the reference for that payment. Given that the payment is done electronically (and I have a so-called "Green Bank Account"), I don't get any paper, hard copy of receipts. What I did was to "print" a copy of the receipt to a standard windows file in .xps format, which I understand is a standard Microsoft format, though I have never seen it before. I briefly toyed with the idea of trying to convert this file to another format, but decided this might look "dodgy" and just sent a notification email with the .xps file as an attachment and I duplicated the information in the .xps file in the email. I received an acknowlegement that the invoice had been marked as paid.

The next day, I received another invoice for what i presume is a small outstanding amount that had not been included in the first invoice (for £6.00, in fact). So, given that what I had done the prevjous day was acceptable and apparently went through with no problems, I merely repeated the procedure. This time, however, I got an email sent back saying that the file was in .xps format and not .jpg format, and I had to resubmit the receipt in jpg format for it to be forwarded and read by the billing department! This made me very puzzled, and so I sent a reply explaining that the very previous day I had paid an invoice by sending an .xps file of the online receipt, and that was accepted with no problem, so I wondered exactly what the problem suddenly was. I asked them to check whether they really needed to have the receipt in .jpg format, and let me know. I asked this because the electronic transfer has happened, and the only file copy I have of it is now in .xps format. I could get a copy of the contents of this file up on my screen and do a partially screen-grab of it into jpg format, but this seems quite unsatisfactory, especially given that I had included all the details of the payment (as I had the previous day), and had used the invoice number as the reference for the payment I had made by bank transfer.

So, my suggestions are this:

1) Can someone check whether requests to send out information enabling lost passwords to be dealt with is working or not (as I mentioned in the second paragraph)

2) Could some clarification be made as to (a) what exactly "scanned receipt" means and (b) what restrictions eukhost want to make on acceptable formats used for "scanned receipts"?

3) The inconsistency between an accepted form of notification of payment made by myself on one day and one made on the following day is worrying and may have led to a situation where I'm not sure what I can do to resolve it, other than posting here. How did this apparent inconsistency arise? I think this needs to be sorted out, otherwise other people may find themselves in the situation where they have used one method successfully to pay one invoice, and then suddenly find themselves with a problem when they try to pay another invoice using the same method. Note that the two invoices were sent and the same payment method attempted a matter of 2 days apart; the first was successful, and the second seems to be problematic.

On top of all that, the reason I am paying by electronic bank transfer is that I am currently abroad teaching, and so I was wary about using anything other than electronic bank transfer as it seemed to me that this was the safest way of ensuring that I satisfied eukhost that I am who I say I am.

[ddstretch]

And just now, I have received an email from eukhost telling me that my domain is about to expire unless I renew it! I just want to know what is happening here! Surely things can be arranged to be less confusing than this! The £6.00 second invoice I have paid, but which seems to be in some kind of limbo at the moment was to protect the domain name, and I guess this is why I have received this latest email, but it does suggest that something *serious* needs to be done about sorting out the instructions and the mathods of accepting payment and so on!

[ddstretch]

Well, I received no answer to my request for clarification, and eventually, after an effort, I managed to download a screen capture program.

I got the .xps file displayed on my PC and then captured it as a jpg image.

This I sent off to the billing department and they seem to have accepted it.

However, I still think some clarification is still needed. I am puzzled why the xps file was acceptable on one day, and on the following day it wasn't.

It might also be an idea to modify the instructions on the billing information web pages to specify that the billing department has a preference for jpg files for the "scanned copies" or screen dumps.

I've also not received any email about the lost password problem which prevents me from logging onto part of the site.