We generally use USAA for our insurance products. It's a good company. But there's been a minor annoyance with their website and its billing information for some years.
We have auto insurance, plus our home insurance, plus multiple rental property coverage.
It's important to pay the auto and home insurance out of our personal account and the rental property insurance out of our property LLC company account.
I pay each premium in full when it comes due because that's simpler on our bookkeeping than each month having to calculate how many pennies go against which policy for which property.
All of that is fine and good.
Except that their website is screwy. When I enter the website there's a list of policies on it. Plus there's a line that says "Auto & Property Insurance" with a $ balance on it. That $ balance is NOT what I owe right now, it's what I'll owe at some point over the next few months as the various policies come due. Personally, I think that's confusing as hell.
If I click on that line it takes me to a new page. That new page showed the payment history, the policy amount due history, and also the up-coming future policy due information, all in one glorious jumble. The actual billing statement was also there which showed the current amount due (not the "will be due sometime in the future" number from the first page.
It's rather a pain in the butt to sort it all out but the rest of the service is so good that I've ignored it.
However, about 3-4 weeks ago I went online to check my statement to see what I owed. The front page showed I owed $2284 and change, but as we now all now, that means that I don't necessarily owe that much. Maybe I owe that amount, maybe less.
The detail page just has a couple of sentences that says my account balance is being updated and check back later. No other detail. It's been that way for 3-4 weeks so we're not talking about me checking it during the few moments that it's updating my account balance.
So I call to sort it out. Of course, there's no automated menu option to handle this so I have to get a human, who naturally will be in the wrong department and have to shuffle me off to someone else. It takes awhile before the very nice person understands that I have two problems, I need to know how much I owe right now and I need the website fixed.
It turns out that I don't owe anything right now. I actually have a negative balance because USAA issued every auto policy holder a credit. Their claims are way down because people are driving so much less. I think that's the third time this year they've issued a credit. So I have a negative balance.
After getting handed over to the web team and getting them to understand the problem, I'm told it's working as designed because I have a negative or zero balance.
I tell them that's crazy and the design needs to be changed.
It makes no sense to tell me on one web page that I owe thousands of dollars and then refuse to show me my payment and billing history, plus my current statement, because I actually have a credit balance. If they want to prevent me from paying money due to the credit balance, they should disable the payment button, not hide my transaction history! And if that's their intent, the message should say that and not that the account is being updated and check back later. That design is crazy and needs to be changed.
There was a long silence. I now have an incident number for it because it's being escalated upwards because the design was totally indefensible.
I'm curious to see if they get a smarter person to decide what it should do than the current one.
If I just paid the minimum each month and didn't have rental properties, I wouldn't have this problem.