Online bills late or not arriving by due date

Kathy Schurzky

Credit card online bills are not arriving prior to the due date. I receive printed bills to ensure accurate conversion from Q BIll Pay. Must I turn off manual (mailed) bills to received timely electronic bills? Banks in question: Chase, FNB Omaha, Citibank NA (ExxonMobil).

RFB

I have found your question to be true for some billers. It seems that it all depends on the billers system. Some require online billing and payment to permit Quicken Billpay to work. Others can send both paper and ebill invoices. Just to complicate matters further, some ebillers have systems that do not sent electronic invoices to Quicken, but do permit electronic payments from Billpay. My mortgage company is in this category. The whole Billpay feature is very much in a state of flux right now, but it is not a Quicken issue, the entire issue is how the billers accounting system works with Billpay.

RFB

I have found your question to be true for some billers. It seems that it all depends on the billers system. Some require online billing and payment to permit Quicken Billpay to work. Others can send both paper and ebill invoices. Just to complicate matters further, some ebillers have systems that do not sent electronic invoices to Quicken, but do permit electronic payments from Billpay. My mortgage company is in this category. The whole Billpay feature is very much in a state of flux right now, but it is not a Quicken issue, the entire issue is how the billers accounting system works with Billpay.

Chris_QPW

RFB said:

The whole Billpay feature is very much in a state of flux right now, but it is not a Quicken issue, the entire issue is how the billers accounting system works with Billpay.

When I look at this I wouldn't call it "in a state of flux right now".

Let's face it what the third party is doing is logging into none standardized websites and trying to schedule bill payments.  This means that the problems aren't "temporary", they will be there forever, and for that matter constantly changing as the billers change their systems.

I'm a very strong believer in using the biller's bill system  I have almost every bill setup for automatic payment, and I have been doing this for 25+ years with no problem.  But there is a fundamental difference between what I do and what Quicken Bill Manager does.  I'm a human that can go to the site and understand all the ramifications of turning on automatic bill payment.  Some "script" can't understand all these nuances.

To me it seem that anyone that is using Quicken Bill Manager doesn't care much about their credit scores, or payment late fees.

I would certainly recommend either doing the setup yourself at the billers sites, or maybe switch to a financial institution that support paying bills through Direct Connect, or using your financial institution's bill pay website.  In fact I would recommend sending checks over such a system as Quicken Bill Pay.

Kathy Schurzky

Thanks for your comment. Indeed I do care about my credit score. More important to me is an accurate reconciliation BEFORE paying any bill or finalizing monthly investment statements. Reconciling, paying, and updating the payment register in one step is a real time-saver. Nothing is perfect, to be sure. Thanks again and Happy New Year!

RFB

> @Chris_QPW said:
"....
> I'm a very strong believer in using the biller's bill system  I have almost every bill setup for automatic payment, and I have been doing this for 25+ years with no problem. 
>
> To me it seem that anyone that is using Quicken Bill Manager doesn't care much about their credit scores, or payment late fees."

What you have said is all well and good if you have predictable income received on predictable dates. No argument from me.

But, most of my income is from rentals, and renters do not always pay on-time and sometimes never all all. Like many others, I use the accounts receivable feature in Quicken to confirm and document rents as both due and paid (hopefully). Paying thru the biller's websites would require me to visit over thirty of them each month. A time consuming and administrative intensive event as each one is different. Autopay is not an option here as it would require constant monitoring of my three checking accounts to ensure that funds are always in the right place at the right time. Further, I have experienced several situations where an error on the biller's side has created problems of either over or under billing, and in one case, double billing. The desire for Billpay is driven by the need to reduce overheads and complexity, not increase it.

I will continue to look to Quicken and the billers to streamline Billpay and seek a higher level of standardization.

jrich75

RFB said:

I will continue to look to Quicken and the billers to streamline Billpay and seek a higher level of standardization.

It is important to realize that Quicken contracts for the Bill payment service and does not actually control how it works.  Every service change must be negotiated rather than just initiated (e.g. the long delay in implementing additional monthly payments).  The fact that the current provider only makes electronic payments to online billers is a serious shortcoming that for me, is a deal breaker.  Also, the Quick Pay process actually gives creditors the access information for my payment accounts (something I had previously tried to avoid).
So, after trying for months to make it work, it was clear that I would always have to process a significant number of my bills manually.  For me the hassle wasn't worth the trouble.  I deleted all online billers and downgraded to Deluxe which has saved me both dollars and payment anxiety.  It is much easier to just retrieve the bills manually when I know they have arrived and then initiate the proper payment directly through my bank or credit union (usually just a couple times a month).  I actually find that this takes less time and effort than checking/waiting for online bills from the small number of my creditors that I can set up for bill retrieval.

Chris_QPW

RFB said:

> @Chris_QPW said:
"....
> I'm a very strong believer in using the biller's bill system  I have almost every bill setup for automatic payment, and I have been doing this for 25+ years with no problem. 
>
> To me it seem that anyone that is using Quicken Bill Manager doesn't care much about their credit scores, or payment late fees."

What you have said is all well and good if you have predictable income received on predictable dates. No argument from me.

But, most of my income is from rentals, and renters do not always pay on-time and sometimes never all all.

I don't see how this affects your bills.  Your income might be unpredictable, but the bills aren't.  Your utility company isn't going to "not send a bill" just because you don't get paid on time.

But I would point out  something about my use of automatic payments for my bills.  Most of them actually are "paid" by credit card (one that pays me cash back).  As such I have 30 to 20 days to know what my bill is going to be for any given credit card.  Now I personally never carried a balance and as such these credit cards are in turn paid by automatic transfers from my checking account to my credit card accounts, but one could easily decide not to make the full payment for the one or two or such credit cards.

And even if you don't "buy into" this idea (lots of people don't like the idea of the fact that billers can "pull money" {but strangely enough have no problem with Quicken Bill Pay, which does this using "third party 'scripts'"!), the real point is that as I look at how this system works I as (an experienced developer) can't see how it can ever be made to be reliable.  And it is your credit score and late fees that are on the line.  There are already numerous reports on here of late/missed payments and such.

And @jrich75 as pointed out most of this "not working right" isn't in Quicken Inc's ability to change.  And I don't expect the third party to change either.  Their whole system is based on logging into biller's sites.  Direct Connect, Old Quicken Bill Pay, and your financial institution's website are all "push systems".  That means that only one site is sending payments.  You can't expect the same kind of reliability out of a system that requires connecting to every one of your biller's websites (with no standards on how to do that I might add) and expect it to be as reliable.

Note that the same kind of thing plays out with Direct Connect vs Express Web Connect for getting transactions.  Direct Connect is a standardized protocol where Quicken talks directly to the financial institution.  Express Web Connect is:
Quicken syncs with Quicken server, which in turn talks to Intuit server, which in turn uses "scripts" to log into the unstandardized financial institution's website.

This isn't done because Express Web Connect is better than Direct Connect it is done because only about 2000 financial institution's out of over 35,000 financial institutions support Direct Connect.  In other words it is done out of desperation.  The same can be said of the way the third party gets and pays bills.

Chris_QPW

BTW here is a recent post of exactly what I mean:
https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7885655/bugs-in-bill-reminder-software

In this case I don't know if it was a "Quicken fault" or the third party software, but frankly I wouldn't care.  Why this person is willing to accept this and keep using this boggles the mind!