In 2017, Tangerine “updated” its website and in many ways made it harder to find what you want and do the tasks that you need. Although I had previously written about how to set up bills for online payment at Tangerine, everything changed with this new design and I had to figure it out all over again. Here’s how I added my new credit card account as a bill payee and got rid of my old account on the 2017 Tangerine website.
NOTE: As a Kind Observant Reader pointed out, you can only pay bills from a Tangerine chequing account. You cannot pay bills directly from your Savings account. (You can instantly transfer cash from Savings to Chequing, though, and they pay from your Chequing account.)
Adding a New Account to Pay Bills on the 2017 Tangerine Website Design
When you sign in to your Tangerine account, you will notice a link at the top right of the screen called Pay Bills. If you click on it, you can send money to an existing Bill Payee to settle your bill. Unfortunately, though, it does NOT let you add a new account to pay or delete an existing account. So where do you have to click? Eventually I found out:
- Sign in to your Tangerine account/s.
- There are two rows of links across the top of the page.
Look along the second one: Overview Insights Transactions Bills and click on the link: Bills
The Bills Page
Near the title of the page, click on the link: Add a Bill
The Add a Bill Popup Window
- Start typing the name of the bill you want to pay.
For example, I started typing RBC to add my new Petro-Points linked RBC card. - The system will prompt you with a list of possible matches. If you can find the one you need, click on it to select it.
- Click on the Next button.
- As prompted, type in the identifying number for the account you wish to pay. You will usually find this number on your bill.
- Click on the Next button.
- As prompted, you can type in a nickname for this bill which will show up on your list of Bill Payees.
- I typed in: Petro-Canada VISA
- Click on the Next button, or if you don’t want to use a nickname, click on the Skip button.
- You can now choose whether to pay the bill manually or whether to set up an automatic payment of the same amount each month.
I don’t trust or like automatic payments so I won’t be testing that feature.
Select Manually and then click on the Next button.
The Bill Payment Window
- It will ask if you would like to make a payment to that account right now.
Personally, I like to test these online bill payment systems, so I will make a payment of $1 and check each business day to see if my billable account receives the payment. (It usually takes 2-3 business days for the payment to show up in my credit card statement.) - To set a test, click on Yes, set up first payment now
The Pay Bill from Window
You can generally only pay bills from a chequing account or line of credit. The choices will be listed.
- Click on the account from which to take the money to pay the bill.
- Click on the Next button.
The Select date Window
The system will prompt when you can make the payment, usually the current day or the next business day if you’re trying on the weekend.
Select a date, then click on the Next button.
The Add payment Window
- Type the amount you wish to pay.
I typed $1. - Click on the Next button.
The Review and Confirm your Payment Window
Read through the details of the proposed payment. If it all looks good, click on the Confirm button.
You’re done.
What Happens If I Set Up The Bill Payment Account with the Wrong Number?
I’d really suggest you be careful setting up a bill payment account. I doubt that it’s easy to get your money back or fix it up without a lot of phone calls to Tangerine and so on. I don’t work for Tangerine, nor do I know anyone who does, so I can’t help you, sorry.
Interestingly, when I was practicing for this article, I tried setting up a 16-digit account for RBC Visa as 1234567891234567. When I got to the Review and Confirm your Payment screen, I finally got an error message:
“Error
The Account number entered for the bill payee seems invalid. Please check your records and try again.”
So the system will TRY to spot errors, but it can’t really help if you enter two digits in the wrong order or something.
That’s why I like to do the $1 test before making a big bill payment.
How to Delete or Remove a Bill Payee from Your List of Bill Payment Accounts at Tangerine in 2017
Once I had set up my new RBC card to pay the gasoline bill, I needed to delete the old CIBC Petro-Canada card. Here’s how I did it.
- Sign in to your Tangerine account/s.
- From the second horizontal line of links across the top of the page, find and click on: Bills
From the list Name of Bill or Payee, click on the name of the one you want to delete.
NOTE: You may want to save the data about your monthly payments to that account as that summary will not be available again once you delete the Bill Payee!
Under the line about your monthly average payment, click on the button: Edit
The Edit Bill Payee Window
If you want to permanently delete this bill payee you can do it from this screen.
NOTE: If you delete the Bill Payee, you will lose the summary screen that shows all the payments made to that payee during the previous months. You may want to save that data BEFORE you delete the account.
Once you’ve captured any data you want, click on the red Delete Bill button.
The Delete Bill Payee Window
Review the proposed account to delete. If you’re sure it’s the one you want to get rid of, click on the red Delete button.
You’re done.
Log out of your account. Clear your browser history and cache and close your browser session for extra security.
So my new Petro-Canada account is set up and the test is scheduled to make sure the link is working properly before I get the new bill. And the old account info is stored safely and the account is deleted so I can’t pay to it accidentally. Time to go get gas!
Related Reading
- [How to Set Up a Bill Payee and Delete a Bill Payee at Simplii Financial]
Join In
Do you dislike the 2017 Tangerine website re-design? Me too! Please share your views with a comment.
Same problem here, new “improved” design drives me nuts. That’s what happens, when some idiot is trying to fix something, that is not broken. Just so somebody gets pay for it, I guess. And when you search their web site with “add bill” or “delete bill”, lots of non sense comes up, except the answer to the question. Reminds me MS Windows. Anyway thanks for the advise here. Cheers
Common sense, or user friendly would be, if they just ad extra click-on window “Edit or Delete a Bill”, beside the other two windows (“Pay all Bills” and “Add a Bill”).
Yes, they could make it much more user friendly quite easily!
I agree!
THANK YOU!
New online banking site a messy situation, so not user friendly. How do we get that changed back to the “not broke” model? I’ll sign anything.
I wish Tangerine would change their website back, too!
I’m very sorry for this slow reply.
Should probably add that the bill-paying feature is only for chequing accounts. If you only have a saving account, you can get to the Bills page, but it will just give you an uninformative graphic, not bill-paying sublinks.
Good catch! I had forgotten that annoying quirk because I have both a chequing and a savings account. Thanks for pointing it out!
I’m even having a deeper problem but I think I’ve solved it. I have three billers in there and when I go through the ADD BILL area, it doesn’t let me add a biller, it lets me suggest adding a biller name to Tangerine.
Like why aren’t they testing this stuff?
I am thinking this is due to me having 3 billers, and I probably have to delete one of them to add a new one… not sure.
I hope you got it sorted and I agree they should do more testing. I have more than 5 bills I can pay set up, so I’m not sure why 3 was giving you a problem?