With its tremendous reach and expertise India Post specializes in acceptance of payments across the counter and their consolidation. e-Payment is a ‘Many to One’ service through which bills (telephone, electricity etc) paid by customers in post offices are electronically consolidated. The key features of the service are as follows:

  Post Office collects bill payment across the counter from customers for Service Providers or

   billers like BSNL, Airtel, RTOs, etc.

  Post Office issues a receipt to the customer and accounts for the transaction.

  The collection data is updated into a Central Server and is accessible to the Biller through a

   web interface.

  The accounts are consolidated electronically and amount paid to the Biller at one point

   convenient to the Biller.

  Biller can also upload details of bills which facilitates the customer to pay bill amount at post

   office even if bills are not received.

  Billers can download the collection details in formats required by them.

            Any organization that wishes to become ePayment biller may contact the Postmaster, Senior Superintendent of Post Offices, Director of Postal Services or Postmaster General concerned.

Who can be the biller?

The service provider category includes almost the whole gamut of the service industry-

• education,

• finance

• telecommunication,

• electricity,

• water supply,

• government (land revenue, property tax, income tax, police, etc)  

The frequency of payment could be fortnightly to annual.

Biller should provide following information:

• Biller Name: Name of the biller (maximum 15 characters) as to be printed in customer receipts.

• Biller Description: Full Description of  biller.

• Biller Address, city and Pincode.

• E-mail id of biller.

• Details of bills: bill is for what purpose.

• Billing periodicity: monthly, bimonthly, quarterly etc

• Whether customer receipt numbers to be in specific format? If yes receipt number width, prefix and suffix characters if any.

• Description field names with maximum field width, specific field formats if any, date formats, whether field to be printed in customer  receipt.

• Amount fields with amount receiver name, office through which payment is desired to get, amount maximum and minimum limits if any.

• If bills can be accepted by scanning barcodes then from character and to character of  each fields with field name and other details as above should be provided.

            If biller wants to upload bill details:

• Upload file format: either plain text or XML.

• In case of text file format field separator (delimiter) character and field positions in text file.

• In case of XML format  XML tags for each fields in file should be provided.

            If biller wants to download collection details:          

• Mode of file transfer: either email, ftp or http

• In case of email, email address should be provided.

• In case of ftp, ftp address, folder name, user name and password have to be provided.

• In case of http, collection details can be viewed by logging into our web site.

• File format: either plain text or XML.

• In case of text file format field separator (delimiter) character and order of fields in text file.

• In case of XML format  XML tags for each fields in file should be provided.

• Periodicity of file download.

• Whether file is to be zipped, or file should contain header.

• Required file extensions (.txt, .doc etc)

Web site address: epayment.ptcinfo.org