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Grieving about Quicken Bill Manager replacing Quicken Bill Pay
I am very disappointed about the functionality and extremely limited use of Quicken Bill Manager that is advertised as an improvement over Quicken Bill Pay. As a long-term user of Quicken Bill Pay, I am unable to see a real benefit to using the new system. In fact, my needs will not allow me to use the new system. Therefore, this will probably be the "improvement" that causes me to quit using Quicken. I purchased Quicken primarily to have Quicken Bill Pay tend to my bills with the automatic rules and minimal attention.
I have been using Quicken and Quicken Bill Pay for many, many years. Quicken Bill Pay's functionality and usefulness has been worth the subscription cost. I commonly make 25 to 30 payments per month through Quicken Bill Pay. The MAXIMUM of 12 electronic payments and 6 checks informed me that I must find another system. Additionally, I tend to my bills every two weeks, not daily. Any system, such as Quicken Bill Manager, that only allows "right now" payments is not for me. It is apparent that I must find another system of paying my bills while tracking my finances; a system that meets my needs.
My hope, albeit not a real expectation, is that Quicken increase the functionality and capacity of Quicken Bill Manager before they terminate use of Quicken Bill Pay. I am a highly loyal customer that would like to continue to buy this product; but it has to work for me. As advertised Quicken Bill Manager does not meet my needs, and my needs are not that demanding.
I have been using Quicken and Quicken Bill Pay for many, many years. Quicken Bill Pay's functionality and usefulness has been worth the subscription cost. I commonly make 25 to 30 payments per month through Quicken Bill Pay. The MAXIMUM of 12 electronic payments and 6 checks informed me that I must find another system. Additionally, I tend to my bills every two weeks, not daily. Any system, such as Quicken Bill Manager, that only allows "right now" payments is not for me. It is apparent that I must find another system of paying my bills while tracking my finances; a system that meets my needs.
My hope, albeit not a real expectation, is that Quicken increase the functionality and capacity of Quicken Bill Manager before they terminate use of Quicken Bill Pay. I am a highly loyal customer that would like to continue to buy this product; but it has to work for me. As advertised Quicken Bill Manager does not meet my needs, and my needs are not that demanding.
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On a positive note the Quicken support person said that as a result of the Covid-19 virus that they were extending the life of Bill Pay through the end of August 2020. Hopefully before then Quicken will realize their mistake and take positive action to keep Bill Pay.
However, with the new bill manager, I will have to go back in and pay it on the date I want - can't preset the date. So, it is a throwback to before all of the bill papers that came before. Your average bank site is better that this.
I think all of my institutions are still there. So you could use the "send" option when you pay a bill - not using bill manager - and when you update, it probably will go to bill payer as usual. That is good until they turn it off on Aug 31. But we should all complain that they should not switch over until they have the functionality improved.
Now running Quicken Windows Subscription, Home & Business
Retired "Certified Information Systems Auditor" & Bank Audit VP
Since it exactly applies to me and I cannot say it any better, quoting the first post above "My hope, albeit not a real expectation, is that Quicken increase the functionality and capacity of Quicken Bill Manager before they terminate use of Quicken Bill Pay. I am a highly loyal customer that would like to continue to buy this product; but it has to work for me. As advertised Quicken Bill Manager does not meet my needs, and my needs are not that demanding."
A very disappointing end to 20 years of using a mostly excellent product.
AND also support a direct connection with Quicken.
Enter the transactions into Quicken, perform the usual One Step Update,
and the transactions are uploaded into the bank bill payments.
Take a look - .... Tools --> Account List -
and see if your bank is listed as - Direct Connect - and has Bill Payment avail -
Again, the Quicken software presented essentially the same check register as it had since I started using Quicken in January, 2000. Using the check register to enter bills to paid by Quicken or just entering manual entries for direct deposits, etc. worked very well and was very intuitive. It was not broken so it is beyond any possible logic why Quicken would make such radical changes that just make interfacing with it much harder, time consuming, and less intuitive. After 20 years it makes me angry to see something that worked so well changed for no obvious reason. I also do not appreciate now having to find a new way of paying bills after 20 years of an excellent system. Changing the name from Bill Pay to Bill Manager I am sure was driven by legitimate business/contractual reasons but that doesn't explain why the software interface is now so much more time consuming and annoying to use.
I find it desirable to have the Quicken Check Register and account data all stored on my computer, not on someone's cloud. I can quickly print any report needed, have full control and accountability for backing up my data, and do not have to worry about using a bank or some other cloud based service to be hacked. Just using the mouse I can very quickly review/find any check going back 20 years or print any report needed for my accountant in just minutes. ps56k, you are right, I am going to start using the banks but they will not be able to provide the same convenience, ease of use, security, etc. that Quicken did until now.
Since this thread is about bill paying it sounds like you have been working under a false sense of security.
There isn't any bill paying system that isn't "cloud" based, and that includes Quicken Bill Pay.
Not to say that Quicken Bill Pay isn't secure, but there isn't any reason to believe it was any more secure than Quicken Bill Manager is. And it if I had to pick a bill system that is the "most secure" it would certainly be the one at my financial institution, not some third party service.
I understand things change over the years. But, what I perceive here, are normal business changes (Intuit spinoffs, Metavante, etc.) that resulted in unnecessary and much less friendly/useful changes to the software interface. No matter what goes on under the hood the software interface can be anything the software publisher wants it to be so why cannot it not be just as friendly as it previously was? I think Quicken will still do what I need but in a manner that makes it so unfriendly to use it has become unacceptable.
Quicken Bill Pay works mainly with ACH transfers. Which means it has your account number and is authorized to send transfers for you. If someone was able to hack the Quicken Bill Pay servers they could send out transfers as they saw fit.
I certainly don't agree with all the decisions they have made over the years, and certainly not in this area. But it is their product, not mine, and what's more they aren't always wrong (in my opinion) in not doing what at least some customers are requesting.
For instance they aren't wrong in not creating a method for converting over all the bills from Quicken Bill Pay to Quicken Bill Manager. First off it would have taken a lot of time, time that they really needed to get Quicken Bill Manager even working to the level it does now. Second off it would most likely have resulted in a series of bugs when "most, but not all" converted correctly. And last, it would have all been done for a system that basically is thrown away after it is used.
Online Bills has years of history, including time where it was corrupting data files. And at the best of times some bills weren't updating, or other kinds of problems like doing "strange" things to the reminders they were linked to. Not to mention that from day one if you linked a reminder with an online bill all estimating was turned off. And some bills would give zero for the estimate when in "Awaiting Next Bill" state.
I think for the most part people just gave up on Online Bills more than anything really getting fixed. And then we have Quicken Bill Manager based on that. How could it possibly be reliably?
I don't use a bill pay service, instead I have all my bills paid with automatic payments (biller pulls funds from my credit card), which has worked for me over 25 years. But if I did, from what I have seen on here I would never trust Quicken Bill Manager.
> I don't use a bill pay service, instead I have all my bills paid with automatic payments (biller pulls funds from my credit card), which has worked for me over 25 years
Virtually if not all, mortgage payments can not be made by credit card unless you use a third-party vendor. For example, one charges 2.8% that is popular and only works with Discovery and Mastercard, not VISA. There are other vendors that will not accept credit cards since it is costly for them via the merchant fees.
I would love to pay my mortgage via cc for reward points, although unless paid off quickly, would reduce your FICO scores due to utilization rates.
While not trying to defend Quicken too much, remember it was their Bill Pay provider that cut them off. It would be interesting if they just dumped them to concentrate on their other larger businesses or if 1) raise their fee which new Quicken powers refused to pay or, maybe, just a cost-cutting move by new Quicken owners.
Like many here, I have used Quicken for 20+ years and rely on it for business, integration with Turbo Tax etc. and will continue to use it. However, while I have a CPA nerd background. I gave up on the new Bill Manager and actually found it very easy to use my Banks service, which uses direct connect with Quicken (MidFirst a smaller bank).
Regardless, getting mad at Quicken folks will likely not solve their problem of why they changed. "It is what it is," unfortunately
And yeah I totally agree that I treat it as "what it is" even though I certainly disagree with how Quicken Inc does things from time to time, for the most part they do a good job and it is their product not mine, and I don't see anyway that it is going to change. People just have to figure out what works best for them with the new situation. No matter what we might want the world isn't going to allow you to do the same thing forever.
Besides cutting loose from Quicken's sketchy bill pay, this also allows me to easily "shadow" Quicken in [removed], which I have also done for the past few years. [removed - no soliciting] with double entry, etc., and I've been doing this to keep an option open and protect my data just in case Quicken decides to make another significant product change that I just couldn't live with.
I'll probably renew my Quicken subscription again this year, but will "downgrade" to the "Deluxe" version since that's all I need... especially without bill pay.
I can agree with most people on this thread that the new version is a Kludge and should be entered into the Worst Intuit Programming Mistake of All Time contest, but it's really worse than even that.
Sure, you can schedule payments through bank bill pay services, but what is really annoyingly missing is the "IF, THEN, ELSE" part of Online Bill Pay. This is where you could say the following; IF the bill is more/less than _______, THEN pay ______, OR ELSE pay __________. This made the monthly bills totally automatic when you might be paying down a credit card for more than the recommended minimum payment or were scheduling regular recurring amounts to pay off a 0% balance amount over the 6-12 interest-free time span. All I can see that bank bill pay does is allows you to enter specific amounts prior to the due/send date but you must do that on a routine regular monthly style basis or else problems arise - nothing automatic about it, it must be monitored weekly/monthly/daily to avoid errors and omissions.
On Online Bill Pay I could quickly see the queue of pending bills with attached View Bill windows and adjust or reschedule future payments - not an option I can see in Bill Manager, not even an obvious date of payment queue window.
All in all, after well over 20+ years of using Quicken from DOS days - I'm looking for a different check register program - since without a functioning Bill Pay/Manager module that's all Quicken actually is now.