"The amount of time a payment can be scheduled out is determined by the biller" ???

mjbank

Why on earth does the biller have any control over when I can schedule a future payment to them?  That's MY business along with my financial system (i.e. Quicken).  With the old Quicken Bill Pay, I could say "send an online payment for $100 to Acme in 4 weeks."  (We do this so we don't have to sweat it during travel months.)

When we try to schedule an online payment from the checking account register, the Quick Pay pop-up keeps giving us this annoying "Biller requires a date of N/NN or earlier."

We CAN apparently set up Check Pay in advance but not the online version ("Quick Pay").

I sort of get that if you are paying from the Bills page, then Q wants to wait till it gets a bill before you push a button to pay that particular bill.  But I thought the solution to sending EXTRA payments to a known online payee was to fire one off from the checking account register?

What am I missing?

mjbank

Insight:

Acme says "awaiting next bill" on the Bills page.  It also says "Paid (Quick Pay) $NN1 on Aug 5" (this was for July statement).

DW (Dear Wife) went to Acme's website and saw that Acme had closed and was owed "$NN2" for the August statement.  She tried to schedule an online payment for "$NN2" on Sept 6 (2 weeks before it's actually due) but she got the ""Biller requires a date of 8/25 or earlier" error.

Problem 1: Q doesn't understand that we ALREADY PAID the July bill (even though it reported that payment right there on the Bills screen).  I'm assuming that it was trying to avoid us paying the July bill late.

Problem 2: Q seems to be lagging several days behind on fetching online bills from billers.

Problem 3: Q should WARN us that the online payment we're trying to schedule MIGHT cause a bill to be paid late, but LET US SCHEDULE THE PAYMENT.

Problem 4: For users of the old Quicken Bill Pay (which had a fairly straightforward mental model), the architecture that confounds online payees and Billers and Quick Pay is just too complicated.  The Biller (online payee data that allows us to send online payments to an account) should be separated from the Bill (which can be fetched and help us pay the right amounts at the right times).  Check your object model.