Online and paperless bills - Help or Hindrance?

Paperless bills are a common "convenience" 

It is that time of year for Car insurance renewal.

I think like a lot of people, we have put our car insurance in the "paperless" category, along with the utilities, council tax, phone, broadband etc.

We only get our documents printed if we do the work ourselves.

The Network Manager mentioned it yesterday in a fit of And Another Thing I have to Pay, so I looked for the documents and then found that last year, when the deed was done we had opted for online documentation, but he didn't sign in and print out the documents.  To be honest, when do you really need to produce them anymore?  Tax is done online. So there are no trips to the Post Office with all the relevant documentation in your hand.  It kind of slips your mind that these things are due.

I did the usual online comparison thing and found that the two cars could be insured for approx £310.

The current insurer would not give me a quote online as, after I had tediously put in our information, it suggested that I telephone customer service as it "believed we were already customers".  It would have been nice if they had come up with that little gem when I entered the vehicle registration numbers or email address and not after I have entered every scrap of data requested, for both cars and both drivers!

The same company has played the game with us before.  I was prepared for their usual tricks.  I went online to their documents portal and found our documents.  The "current" documentation is showing the not yet started until the end of the month documents.  I had to trawl three documents to find the important information - how much is this going to cost me.  
Total for the two cars and two drivers - £440. These documents have been on the documents portal for a couple of days. Why did they not issue a letter? Or, more fitting to the paperless ethos, an email to say something along the lines of "Its that time again, please find your renewal info online".  At least with the utilities you get a heads up when they ask for a meter reading.

To make matters worse, the quotes I got did not include the sizable excess that is on our policy, meaning that each time we claim we loose a couple of hundred quid of it.  Not  that we have made many claims, I have 19 years NCB and He has 16.  

I will be chatting to their customer services in the next couple of days.