Add description field to Check Pay Payees so multiples of same Payee are distinguished in register

John Ellis

I have 10 policies with State Farm, each separately invoiced with a different account number. In the old Quicken, there was a Description field that would let you distinguish payments to them in the register, with the description appended to the payee's name, e.g.

State Farm{description}

But there doesn't appear to be any way to do that with Check Pay payees. (I can't use Bill Pay because Quicken repeated tells me my Statefarm.com account is locked.) So I have to manually enter something in the memo field each time I make a payment (20 times a year) and trust that I don't make a mistake and that I use the same memos consistently to enable reporting and searching.

Tell me again how Quicken makes paying bills convenient?

Quicken_Natalie

Hello @John Ellis,

Thank you for bringing this to the attention of the Community, although I apologize that this ability is currently unavailable in Quicken.

I have gone ahead and turned this Discussion into an Idea post so that other users are able to vote on it.

Please be sure to add your vote by clicking on the gray triangle right above the current vote count, located in the blue box at the beginning of this thread:

Our developer's review Idea posts to get an idea of what people would like Quicken to offer.

Thank you,

Quicken Natalie

Stan B.

Another use case for this is having multiple credit card accounts with the same company -- in my case Kohl's.

John Ellis

Since I posted this two years ago, I stopped using Quicken Check Pay and Bill Pay a year ago. There were just too many rough edges (of which this was just one) and repeated flakiness.  I switched banks so I could use their check pay with Quicken (for free).

UKR

It still is possible to set up register transactions or scheduled reminders using this "State Farm {123456}" payee name construct.

For Check Pay transactions you can add a new Check Pay Payee with the policy number entered in both the Payee Name and the Account Number field (prints in the Memo field of the check) ... of course, you would need to create additional Check Pay Payees, one for each policy.

IMHO, it might be best to let the insurance company use their Autopay system to direct debit the amount due for each policy from your checking account on due date. Let them do the work for you automatically. All you need to do is set up a scheduled reminder in Quicken and record it on or before due date. No more need to worry about mailing checks early enough to arrive and be processed on time.