Those Chase Payments MIGHT go through

Zoolook

Hi - I saw the alert that the Chase Bill Pay might be disabled; I had two bills due for month end so went to Chase and paid them manually there. Imagine my surprise when the scheduled Bill Pay transactions also went through, so today my Discover Card and Con Ed bills both got paid twice. Once by Chase sending money (my manual transaction) and once by the biller withdrawing from my account (the scheduled Quicken payment).

When you schedule a bill through Quicken, there is no confirmation the payment is pending other than in Quicken. You get no alert from the biller saying it's scheduled, and nothing from my bank saying it's pending or funded - even chem king both websites doesn't conform this. So when Quicken sent the alert about Chase disabling 3rd party bill payments, I assumed this was for any new or pending payment (you know what they say about assumptions).

Can someone at Quicken confirm exactly what happens when you schedule a future bill payment, 2 or 3 weeks in advance. Where is it scheduled, and if I needed to change or cancel it, where is the best place to do it to make sure I know it's happened. At this point I don't really trust it.

Frankx

Hi @Zoolook,

Can you clarify exactly how you usually pay bills in Quicken?  You said that you "schedule a future bill payment, 2 or 3 weeks in advance".  Do you use Quicken Bill Pay or Quicken Bill Manager to do this?  Or, do you normally use Chase's bill payment service through Quicken?

Let me know and I'll see if I can help.

Frankx

Zoolook

Hi @Frankx

I don't usually use Quicken to pay bills, this is the first month I've tried the functionality - ordinarily I would schedule the payment on the Chase site, then manually enter the transaction in Quicken as a future transaction.

In Quicken Mac, bills scheduled at Chase's website don't download until they've cleared, but in Quicken Windows they download as a future transaction. In switching to Mac Quicken as my primary, I decided to use the bill pay feature so I don't have to manually enter them.

Attached is an example, this is the Discover Card which got paid twice. I actually got a confirmation this morning at 9:05am that Chase Bank was added for online payments, and then one minute later a confirmation the payment had been made. Given I scheduled this payment over 2 weeks ago, here's what must be happened.

When you schedule a payment in Quicken, the instructions sit on Quicken's servers until the day of the payment, they then send the message to the eBiller with the information as to where to debit the payment. If the biller already has the bank info, they'll debit the payment, if not then the bank information is set up and then the payment is requested.

When Quicken introduced the new bill paying feature, you initially could not schedule payments in the future, so that was added. What I suspect is they simply batch up the instructions until the pay date and then send the instruction, rather than send the instruction immediately with a future pay-date. If they did the latter, then you'd see a pending payment on the biller's site (which I never did).

That last part is important. Because I didn't see anything on Discover's site about the eBill being set up, I assumed it wasn't going through and went to Chase's site and did it manually as I have numerous times before. However because Quicken's batch woke up this morning and processes the payment, it has been paid twice.

BTW in the last 30 mins, Quicken sent me a confirmation the bill was paid!