Multiple Amounts associated with an online biller

Kerry Lawson

When an Online bill is setup successfully, there are two amounts that are displayed on the Bills / Online Bills page: 1) Minimum amount due; and 2) Total amount due - which is OK. As a general rule I establish an amount greater than the minimum but less than the full amount to be paid monthly. For promotional finance arrangements, this ensures that the balance is paid off before the promotional end date. This is important for the Projected Balances to work properly which I believe is based on reminders. How do I properly setup reminders to remember the calculated payment amount that I set for that biller and that will properly display in both Projected Balances and as the payment amount to be used when clicking on Quick Pay? One biller that I have setup now shows the minimum payment from the biller on the Bills / Online Bills page and if I click Quick Pay that same amount appears. The reminder for this biller shows the minimum amount in the reminder as though I performed an "Edit this instance". If I perform a "Edit this instance and all future instances", my calculated minimum payment amount is displayed in the reminder but this amount has been overridden by the minimum due from the Biller.

Chris_QPW

Whenever you use a online bill linked to a reminder it overrides the amount with the bill amount, which is either the min or the full amount.  The only way to have a different amount is not to connect the reminder to the online bill.

Kerry Lawson

Not to disagree with you Chris, after the bill is received, I can edit the reminder as "Edit this Instance" and enter the amount to be paid. The reminder updates in the Projected Balances window AND the online bill now reflects the amount to be paid along with the total amount. Quick Pay reflects the amount to be paid as well. What would be ideal is that Quicken would recognize the amount in the reminder as the minimum (assuming it is greater than the biller's minimum).

Chris_QPW

The Online Bill "takes over" the "next instance" amount.  You can override it, but on the next bill it is going to go back to what was selected min/full amount.  Also note that any of the "estimates" in the reminders are not used.

Kerry Lawson

Ok, so now with 'estimates', there are 5 amounts potentially at play. I personally have never used estimates but I understand why these would not be used.

Perhaps the use of the other amounts could be considered as a suggestion for the future. When I use other bill paying systems, I set the amount that I want paid for every payment but at present this can not be done with Quicken Bill Pay Manager. If the amount in 'Edit this and all future instances' is > 0, use this as the default payment amount from Quicken. Use the amount associated with 'Edit this instance' as an overall override if > 0 like it does today. There is already an option in the Action menu for a bill to default to the total amount due so perhaps there could also be an option to Default to the minimum biller amount.

I do have one bill that displays under current bill the amount from 'Edit this instance' / 'biller minimum amount' (-$350.70 / -$61.00). In this case the 'Edit this an all future instance' shows the biller's total amount due. The option to default to the total amount due exists in the Action menu on the right of the bill. This would work as well if it remained the same month to month. I did override the 'Edit this instance'. I mention this because it doesn't seem to be consistent with all billers.

Thanks for listening and providing feedback.