I routinely pay my cellphone bills by doing absolutely nothing (apart from having a skim of my bank statement now and again). In the UK almost all regular payments are done using Direct Debit, where you grant the company billing you permission to transfer the money automatically. Sadly it lacks the ability to specify an upper bound on that, but I've yet to have any issues in practice so I'm not massively worried.

Do not do this!!!

If you end up in a dispute with your phone company, you are putting yourself at their mercy. It's waaay easier to fight a charge you haven't paid yet, then to recover money you've already paid.

I've gone through hell because of this.

The bank doesn't allow you to roll back the automatic transfer of money ? Over here (NL) all banks allow you to retrieve your money without any hassle within about 2 months.

In Germany, for each direct debit entry in my ledger (in the web interface of the bank) I have a small button to revert the debit. I suppose this is standard because I have this button with the 3 banks I am banking with (business and personal).

Depends on the country. In the UK the Direct Debit Guarantee states that "If an error is made in the payment of your Direct Debit, by the organisation or your bank or building society, you are entitled to a full and immediate refund of the amount paid from your bank or building society". The system is used by millions; it's so common for bill payments that paying by another payment method often attaches an additional charge.

[edit] Oh, I guess you mean in the case of a regular payment of an uncertain amount, like a mobile phone bill. I use a pay-as-you-go plan where a direct debit takes a fixed amount out of my account each month, and if I overrun it then my phone stops working until I pay more. I'd definitely think twice before setting up a DD for a mobile phone contract.

You can always get a direct debit refunded by your bank in the UK. It's then the company's responsibility to pursue the debt if they believe that you owe them the money.

In .cz you can also do that and even specify an upper bound (which is apparently mandatory as direct debit authorization for my credit card that got created automatically has upper bound of 999999CZK)

On the other hand I know many people who like me do not use direct debit for "unpredictable" things like cellphone bills. Most other payments can be automated by standing orders, what sucks that even when your monthly phone bill is essentially constant you cannot do that as our cell operators generally assign distinct payment reference for each monthly bill.

I would love it if my bank would start to use this, would save a lot of manual entry for inter person payments.

Standard description : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_Payment_Descriptor

There is slight problem with the fact that while it looks like pretty much country neutral system that is built on SEPA it in reality builds upon czech/slovak ABO system (Automated Banking Operations, which probably holds world record for government project with longest deadline overrun, as it was in development for almost exactly 20 years) and it's data fields for automatic identification of payments (X-VS, X-SS and X-KS in SPAYD IIRC). While SEPA has even more powerful mechanisms for this it seems that they are not much used, maybe exactly because they are too powerful.

One thing that fascinates me is contrast between european giro banking systems and ABO in particular (where account number is just an ID/address and has no security implications) and checking account based system used in US where everithing seems to be somewhat backwards from what would make sense.