Quick Pay Payment Failed

JacTracy

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.

Quicken Anja

Hello @JacTracy,

Thank you for taking the time to post this information to the Community.

Some financial institutions do require a pre-authorization on their end in order to make payments using Quick Pay and/or the payment account that was set up to use Quick Pay. However, this does vary since not all financial institutions require this.

When this happens, users should receive an error message stating "Payment account declined; Validate your bank". More information on this particular topic/error and how to resolve it can also be found in this support article.

Thank you!

JacTracy

Thank you for your reply, Anja.

I'd just like to clarify that the error I encountered was not "Payment account declined; Validate your bank". Presumably this occurs when the biller's web site has accepted the payment request but is unable to complete it. The errors I encountered occurred when the biller's web site refused to accept the payment request. There was never an attempt to execute the payment request and the bank was never contacted.

Looking back on my phone conversations with Quicken support, before identifying what actually happened (with the help of the biller), it was apparent that Quicken support was unaware that a biller would refuse to accept a payment request - they assumed the problem must be occurring when the biller attempted to execute the payment request.

If I had personally logged into the biller's web site to attempt a payment, I would have immediately seen the reason for reject. When Quicken logs into the biller's website on my behalf, the reason for reject does not get passed back through Quicken

fran.menzel.biedinger

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.

neill

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]?

JacTracy

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.