City officials hope soon to offer Vicksburg’s utility customers an option to receive utility bills through email instead of the mailbox.

“We’re waiting on the vendor to complete their work,” said city IT director Billy Gordon. “We’ve done all of our work on our end. Right now, we don’t have a date when we’ll begin the program.”

The city sends monthly utility bills to residential and commercial users, listing charges for water, gas, sewer and garbage collection.

Vicksburg has had online bill-paying for utility customers since September 2011. Currently, Gordon said, 1,608 people use the online payment system and about 78 percent of them, or 1,254, pay their bills online. The remaining 354 use the online service to review bills.

Once the city begins ebilling, he said, utility customers will have the option of receiving bills via email or regular mail by accessing the city’s website at Vicksburg.org and going to the site’s billing service section.

“We’re hoping the customers doing online payments will go to ebilling,” Gordon said. “If they did that, it could reduce our billing cycles.”

He said the city has 10,000 utility customers and uses five billing cycles a month. Gordon said 9,800 bills were sent during the last billing cycle, costing the city $3,700 in postage.

He said the ebilling portal is not yet on the website because Transaction Warehouse, the company that handles the online payments for the city, is in the process of merging the billing and payment activities.

“Once ebilling begins, we’ll ask people to call the water and gas office or send an email and ask to receive ebilling just to be sure the account is set up,” he said. “What we’ll do, after everything’s in place, is perform some test runs to make sure everything is working right before we let it go.”