Doxo is a bill payment center and digital filing cabinet for all your important household paperwork. It's a very good online app for anyone trying to go paperless, because it automatically imports and saves bank statements, credit card statements, and other paperwork from connected accounts. It also serves as a bill payment hub, letting you manage payments to a wide variety of service providers, including household utilities. Don't confuse Doxo with online family organizers, however, as they let you manage day-to-day occurrences, such as events and to-do lists. As a personal finance app with digital filing cabinet built-in, Doxo performs well, is reliable, and is worth checking out.

Getting Started

Signing up for a Doxo account involves giving an email address, setting a password, and providing your ZIP code. The ZIP code helps Doxo find relevant service providers that you'll be able to pay. You don't have to give your name or other identifying information.

When you set up an account with Doxo, the service takes several measures to help keep your documents protected. Every login consists of not only a username and password entry, but also a security question and image. Each stage of the login process appears on a new screen, too, which is a tougher system for hackers to crack. The site uses bank-level security: RSA 2048 encryption with an AES-256 symmetric key. Doxo's security policy outlines additional details.

Once you've created an account, you can customize it. For example, you can create folders for housing different kinds of documents. Some documents you might want to scan and upload yourself, such as deeds to property, warranties, and birth certificates. Other documents can be imported automatically when you connect Doxo to supported accounts.

The type of accounts that are supported is vast. They include financial institutions, frequent flyer programs, phone service providers, and email accounts. For example, if you connect to your AT&T account, Doxo can pull and save statements for you each month. If you connect to an email account that often receives bills sent by providers, those can get filed into Doxo, as well. It's a great service, especially for those accounts that don't save a history of your paperwork. PayPal is one such offender. Only Business and Premier PayPal members get a history of their statements in their accounts. Everyone else gets a monthly statement emailed to them, but no saved history. If you connect Doxo to your email account, you can automatically import and save all those statements.

When you add a provider to your Doxo account, you see the company's name, address, website, support phone number, support email address, Twitter handle, and even its stock ticker symbol. That information comes in handy when you spot something wrong with your accounts and want to get in touch with the company quickly.

I like that Doxo lets you create folders and sections (groups of folders) for whatever you want to store. For example, you might want to upload copies of your medical history, your last will and testament, or paperwork related to your job.

Bill Payment and Free vs. Fee

Bill pay has become a central component of Doxo, and for some, a leading reason to use it, because you can pay or manage multiple bills from one place. Often it's free. If the provider is in Doxo's network, and you've connected to that provider, and you use your bank account to pay (rather than a credit card), there's no extra charge.

But sometimes the payment comes with a small fee, usually around $2.99 or about 3.5 percent of the payment amount if you use a credit card, or if the provider is not in Doxo's network. Another online bill payment hub, Mint Bills, has a similar payment structure, although its fees are a little lower. If you use your bank account to pay a supported provider, it's free. Use a credit or debit card, however, and the transaction fee is 2.49 percent, with a minimum fee of $2.49.

In Doxo, you don't know until the final verification screen whether your bill payment will incur a charge, or how much, and if you can get around it or reduce it by paying through a different method. That final verification screen shows the breakdown of the payment, any service fees attached, and the date the bill will be paid. When there is a service fee, there will be a note about why it's there and when such fees are charged.

When I tried to pay my American Express bill, I couldn't even authenticate the service. Doxo asked for the credit card number and kept telling me it was invalid (it definitely isn't). So I tried making a payment to a different credit card, and that one went smoothly. Doxo asked me how much I wanted to pay, and sure enough, on the payment page, I saw the amount, fee, explanation of the fee, and total.

The account I paid was not connected to Doxo, meaning I hadn't authenticated the account to connect to Doxo. One thing that made the system pretty much useless is that it didn't have any information about my account, such as the total balance, minimum payment due, or when payment was due. If the account is connected, however, you do see more information. Due date and amount due are visible for connected accounts, as well as an option to set up autopay or autoschedule of payments, subject to a maximum dollar threshold. The autopay is helpful, but it doesn't really give you the nitty gritty details you need to manage your bills. To see information such as minimum amount due and account balance, you have to open your bill image, which is also in Doxo, but it does require an extra step. So at this time, the bill pay management promise is not exactly as useful as it might seem.

I expected Doxo to have the expediency of the personal finance tool Mint.com, but it doesn't. Mint gets read-only information almost instantly when you connect to an account. Doxo doesn't work nearly as fast.

I mentioned that Doxo is not an online family management tool, although such websites do exist. Cozi is my favorite among them, and AboutOne is another example. Neither Cozi nor AboutOne supports bill payment or bill management. Rather, they're focused on other aspects of family and household management.

Payment Hub With a Paperless Push

Doxo has a unique position in the realm of personal finance management, letting you pay many bills from one central location, as well as store all the statements associated with those accounts. The addition of a filing cabinet service, where you can upload other important family documents, truly makes it different from any other app out there. It's a good service, worth trying if you have a need for both a central bill payment system and electronic paperwork storage.

While Doxo doesn't compare neatly and directly to Mint, our Editors' Choice among personal finances apps, the related Mint Bills (which has not been reviewed yet) offers a similar payment hub to Doxo's, but with slightly lower fees on average. But Mint Bills doesn't have any additional tools to help you go paperless. If becoming paperless is a goal in addition to managing bills, give Doxo a try.