Confused about the relationship between bill reminders and linked bills

[email protected]

I have successfully used bill reminders for years to project cash flow. Recently I linked reminders to biller accounts --but find the benefit of reminders are limited to the current monthly cycle, or the info available from the biller's account.

Am I setting these links up improperly, or am I missing a concept here? I want the benefit of long-term cash flow projections that are available with bill reminders (the estimate, or set value setting), which are then replaced with the actual month bill amount downloaded from the biller's account.

Thanks in advance for any insight.

John_in_NC

I don't think you are missing anything.

Bill Reminders (I dislike that term-scheduled transactions aren't always bills) are what you have used in the past. The Linked Bills is what goes out and gets the recent amount for a particular transaction-when it works/is supported.

It's a nice concept, but I find them more trouble than worth and don't bother with them. I prefer to pay amounts from official statements from the biller.

GeoffG

As @John_in_NC states, the Linked Bills feature is nice in concept. I was rather excited when this feature was first introduced to the point that I stopped all paper bills and went to email notifications. Then reality set in and found updating bills to be temperamental at best. Not one, but two data file corruptions later and I have ceased using them.

[email protected]

It's good to know I'm not alone.

I'm now using Linked Bills to receive amount due notices, then I manually "pay" the updated amount from reminders. I haven't experienced file corruption and find this manual entry no more difficult than before, although a little silly.

Quicken is missing an obvious step to make this a productive tool --no? That's why I assumed I was making a mistake in the set up. Has anyone directly discussed this with support?

jim sturtz

link to biller.... the idea is that quicken will go out to the billers site use my account info and drag up the amount to enter for the current month? the i somehow tell the system to go ahead and pay it?? currently i put in an estimate for cash flow purposes for my recurring bills. like the power company. then when the 'billpay' grabs the cash i match enter the bank account info into the estimated transaction i've put in recurring bills. is it any better to have quicken go out and grab it? thanks

[email protected]

Obviously, it would be better if Quicken downloaded the current amount due and inserted that value as a payment for the appropriate reminder, BUT leave future reminders for the cash flow and estimates.

Otherwise the only advantage is having the info altogether in Quicken, rather than remember to coordinate with email notices.

That's why I assumed I was missing something, but likely Quicken itself is the clueless party.