Quick Pay Payment Failed

Question

When you  get a Quick Pay payment "Failed" message/email the cause can be the biller's website payment rules.

Bill Pay creates an ACH credit transaction in which your bank "pushes" the payment to the biller.  Except for extremely rare circumstances, the biller must accept the payment.

Quick Pay, however, logs into the biller's website with your credentials and bank account information and creates an ACH debit transaction. The biller's web site "pulls" the money from your bank account. Quick Pay may use the same web portal that users use or may have a special portal (typical for credit cards).

It's not uncommon for the biller to have rules on payment to prevent duplicate transactions or possibly fraudulent transactions. For example, Pacific Power will deny two transactions on the same day from the same bank account no mater the amount or if you still owe.

The Quick Pay login usually occurs withing a few hours, if not minutes, and if the transaction fails you will get a email and Quicken message very quickly. This means that the biller never contacted your bank - ACH transactions are batched and sent overnight.

If you get the failed message the next day or later, first contact your bank. If they have denied the ACH transaction, for example, insufficient funds, they will be able to tell you the reason the transaction failed.

To get more information on why a "same day" transaction failed, call the biller's support line and ask for web/online support. (Skip the billing department, they usually can not see the failed transaction.) Ask web support to examine "your" login for the date you created the QuickPay transaction and tell you why the transaction failed. It was my experience that even web support was unaware of all of the rules to deny a transaction.

JacTracy · Answer

I had three other transactions fail, without any notice from Quicken. Even though I had deleted the old Bill Pay connections, I suspect that Quicken entered the payments anyway to Bill Pay. The scuttlbut is that Metavante (Bill Pay) dropped Quicken rather quickly and Quicken had to scramble to come up with something. They extended Bills &Income, but the original intent was the user paying a bill after Quicken had fetched it. Quicken's first update has some holes in it. The lesson is that prepaying or paying without a bill doesn't always work. This cost me a credit card finance fee, so I have converted all my payments that I can to credit card auto pay (as long as no fee is charged). When these charges appear on my credit card in Quicken, they are easy to categorize (and I don't have to enter all of the info if I make the payment from my bank. For credit cards, I've setup bank auto pay for what is sure to be the minimum payment. When the credit card statement arrives I can either pay from my bank or wait a week for Quicken to retrieve the statement and use Bills & Income. The risk here is that I must wait a week and check back a few days later and make sure the payment was actually made by Quicken.

There's a good chance that Quicken will eventually get this fixed, so I will test it out after the next update.

neill · Answer

Fran, I just had a similar issue. I called support and they said they would escalate the issue and to call them back. Is this what happened to you [removed-speculation]?

fran.menzel.biedinger · Answer

Chase has apparently recently (Nov 1 2020?) changed their interface and requires a one-time code to allow Quick to pay my Amazon credit card (a Chase card) from my Chase cchecking account.  I paid the bill yesterday and today was told the payment failed.  Quicken then led me through updating my access, Chase sent me the one-time code, and life is good again.  I'm not sure whether is was the checking account or the credit card (or both) that triggered this behavior, but I thought I'd give you a heads-up.  My situation was complicated by the fact that the first choice of where to send the one-time code was a cellphone not immediately available to me.
 I have other Chase cards, and as the month goes on, I'll let you know how paying them works out.