adding additional check pays

Greydog9928

I was told through customer service that Quicken is no longer providing the add-on option for 3 check pays/3 quick pays for both Mac and PC.  I don't have the option on my version and I used to use Quicken Bill Pay which I thought was a pre-requisite to being offered this option.

Quicken Anja

Hello @Greydog9928,

Thank you for reaching out to the Community with your question, though I apologize as you were provided with some misinformation by the agent you spoke with regarding this topic.

Quicken Bill Manager Add-On Payments are still being offered as explained in this support article in the blue dropdown section titled To enable Add-On Payments in Quicken for Mac.

As explained in the article; "Automatic Add-On Payments for Mac is currently only available for Quicken Bill Pay users that have migrated to Quicken Bill Manager. Broader availability for Automatic Add-On Payments will be available to users on Mac soon."

Since you mentioned having previously used Quicken Bill Pay; may I ask if you are currently using the same Quicken ID (email associated with your subscription) now, as you were with Quicken Bill Pay? And do you recall receiving the prompt to enable this as well as having enabled the automatic Add-On Payments in the past?

Also, were you by chance given a ticket number for your interaction with support? I'd like to pull the interaction for further review so our team can provide the agent with an appropriate coaching opportunity to avoid this misinformation from being further distributed going forward.

Please, check back and let us know! Thank you.

Greydog9928

Thanks for the reply.  I am using Quicken Premier for Mac and believe I am using the same email address that was used in Quicken Bill Pay.  I have never received a prompt to add-off/add-on payments.  I only see the option to change subscription models.  I called in for this issue and was not given a ticket number.

Greydog9928

so.... how do I add top off/add on payments now since I should be able to.

Quicken Paloma

Hello @Greydog9928, 

Thank you for the additional information and I apologize for the confusion. 

For instructions on how to purchase additional/top-off payments please follow this link. 

Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns. 

-Quicken Paloma 

Greydog9928

This does not help.   I am supposed to be able to add it since I am a Mac Quicken Premier user who previously used Quicken Bill Pay.  The add-on option does NOT show up.

Quicken Anja

Thank you for the additional information.

We will need to do some further digging to investigate this issue, so please bear with us while we do so.

In the meantime, since you were, unfortunately, not provided with a ticket number; Could you please confirm whether it was a call or chat interaction, as well as the date of the interaction and the approximate time of the contact? Thank you.

Greydog9928

Call 941 am PST

Quicken Anja

Greydog9928 said:

Call 941 am PST

Thank you, and to clarify; did this call interaction occur today?

Greydog9928

yes....   

Quicken Anja

Thank you for your patience, and I apologize for the delay.

We were able to pull the phone interaction you had with the support agent you spoke to and again apologize as the agent was 100% incorrect and provided you with misinformation. So, in regard to that; we have gone ahead and forwarded the interaction to the appropriate management team to follow up with the agent directly.

In regard to the issue itself; upon checking your account, we found that the Add-On Payments service has already been enabled for you, according to our system. This would explain why you are not receiving the prompt to enable the extra payments. That being said, could you please verify how many payments in total it shows you have in Quicken? According to what we are seeing on your profile here on our end, you should have 12 Quick Pays and 9 total Check Pays. 

If you do not have 9 total Check Pays, then we ask that you please navigate to Help > Report a problem... and submit a problem report with all of your log files attached, and please post back here to let us know once that is done so we can retrieve them for further review and also escalate this issue as well as your log files to the proper channels to get your Check Pay entitlements straightened out for you.

Please check back and let us know! Thank you.

Greydog9928

Thanks for the follow-up.  Yes I show 12 quick pays 9 check pays.  I am currently out of check pays and I am not getting a prompt to add any more.

Greydog9928

Log and sanitized data file are uploaded

jacobs

Greydog9928 said:

Yes I show 12 quick pays 9 check pays.  I am currently out of check pays and I am not getting a prompt to add any more.

Ah… you hadn't previously indicated that you had already received a boost above the base plan Quicken provides. Hopefully Anja will jump in here, but I'm pretty sure you can only get one "boost" (3 additional check pay and 3 additional quick pay) per month. You can't keep adding 3 more for $3.

If you need more than the 12 + 9 per month, I think you need to  purchase a larger monthly subscription of bill payments, via Quicken.com:



As I understand it, Quicken isn't trying to sell essentially a la carte bill payments. The add-on plan is for people who need just a little more to make it through a month, and you're only charged in a month where you go over your initial limit. For those users who pay a lot of bills via Quicken, they offer these larger plans. I would assume you can add a plan one month and remove it in months where you won't need it.

So unless Anja says there's a different alternative, if you need more payments, I believe you'll have to switch from your standard plan to the 'Plus' plan to gain additional payments. (Or write a few checks by hand and enter them as manual transactions in Quicken. )

Greydog9928

Well if that is the case, it is not clear.  If I am receiving 9 check pays currently , why would I pay an additional $10/month just to increase to 15?  The current options don't make much sense to me personally.

Even more importantly, the vast majority of payees do not take quick pay.  This is a significant issue.  The check pay numbers need to be increased significantly to compensate for this.  Quicken should also understand that most banks do not charge at all for their bill pay service and this is what they are competing against for their service.  

Quicken Anja

Thank you for the additional information and for submitting those.

Just one more question, if you don't mind; Are you out of Quick Pays as well, or just Check Pays?

Greydog9928

Just out of check pays.  Again majority of payees do not take Quick Pay even though that would be my preference

UKR

My 2cents' worth, if I may:

Maybe you should tackle this issue from the other end ... wherever possible, let the biller do all the work to collect your payment automatically and on time. And usually that service is free (look for the fine print, though).

I don't use Bill Pay / Bill Manager at all, neither the one from Quicken nor the one offered by my bank. Since time "B.I." (before the Internet was invented) I have set up almost all of my recurring payments as Direct Debit, PAC Draft, Autopay, APS, whatever the biller calls it. I just authorized the biller to electronically debit the payment directly from my checking or credit card account on due date, sit back, relax and wait for it to happen.

When I get notified of a new statement having arrived, usually by email, all I have to do in Quicken is to run a regular scheduled reminder to record the transaction. Haven't missed a payment in many years.

jacobs

@Greydog9928  Well, now you're talking about policy matters rather than how to get it to function in a specific way. Which is fair enough -- but just know that what's discussed in this forum is unlikely to ever be read by someone in Quicken management.

As for the math of costs, I don't know Quicken's actual costs, but we can take a ballpark guess. Mailing a check starts by costing 55¢ in postage (probably slightly less for a large mailer). Then there's the cost of the check itself, and the process (printing, folding, stuffing, sealing, adding postage, taking to a post office facility). Quicken has a third-party provider who runs this service, Quicken pays them their actual costs plus some markup for their profit. So I think it's safe to guess that Quicken pays a little under $1 per check pay payment. Quicken also has to maintain a billing/tracking system, and incur the costs of charging people's credit cards each month, and presumably make at least a small profit for themselves for this service. So for a standard Quicken Premier user like myself, upgrading from 5 check pay payments to 15 for a cost of $9.95/month seems about right. 

It sounds like you already got charged $3 to increase your check pay payments from 6 to 9. If that's enough to get you through the month, then that's a good deal. If you need more, you don't want that option and you'd want the 'Plus' plan instead for $9.95/month, to go from 6 to 15 payments. I don't know if Quicken Support could switch you to Plus and remove the $3 add-on charge already incurred. If not, for this month you might pay more ($3 + $9.95) for 15 payments, but next month you can eliminate the $3 add-on fee, so it would be $9.95 to fo from 6 to 15 payments. 

I'm not sure if the bill pay service generates much revenue for Quicken. They make it easy to use bank bill pay services as an alternative, so I think bill payment is offered as a convenience for people who don't have or want to use a bank bill payment service, or whose bank charges a monthly fee. I would guess they don't care whether you use Quicken's bill payment service or your bank's, as long as the Quicken product can make things seamless so you'll keep using Quicken. Over time, more and more payments are being done electronically and automatically, so this isn't a growing business. 

Quicken Anja

Hello @Greydog9928,

After further research, oddly enough, it appears that only your Check Pays were increased, but not your Quick Pays. The way the Add-On payments are designed to work is that once the service is enabled it should add 3 more Quick Pay and 3 more Check Pay payments, and would then also increase by 3 more of each for a $3.00 fee each time a new payment is initiated after you run out.

Additionally, we also found that even though your account appears to be enabled, there was no ACH account on file, and these Add-On payments will only send you a prompt as well as continue to function as designed when there is an ACH payment method on file that was transferred over from Quicken Bill Pay. If your subscription lapsed or there was any gap between the time that Quicken Bill Pay was officially discontinued and when you started/set up Quicken Bill Manager, then that would explain the loss of the on-file ACH payment method.

That being said, the faster and simpler solution would be to go with a different monthly plan as previously suggested by Jacobs. However, if you still wish to pursue resolving the Add-On payments option, then we will need to further investigate to figure out exactly what happened during the initial transition first so we can go ahead and request an escalation to have this resolved.

Do you recall whether or not your subscription had lapsed during the transition? Also, when did you make the initial transition/set up Quicken Bill Manager; did it occur before or after Quicken Bill Pay was officially discontinued?

Please check back and let us know how you wish to proceed! Thank you.

Greydog9928

I would like the option of the Add-On payments.  I am still getting a feel for how many I need so don't want to switch plans right now.  Also my hope was that I could pay most bills with Quick Pay but unfortunately it is only a minority of bills.  I also find that lots of utilities such as Southern California Gas work with residential accounts, not commercial/business accounts [I have both].

To answer your question, my subscription did not lapse at all.  It ends the end of this year I believe.  I made the transition to Quicken Bill Manager promptly when the notices went out to make the switch.  I am pretty sure I used Quicken Bill Pay to the very end also.

UKR

Greydog9928 said:

I would like the option of the Add-On payments.  I am still getting a feel for how many I need so don't want to switch plans right now.  Also my hope was that I could pay most bills with Quick Pay but unfortunately it is only a minority of bills.  I also find that lots of utilities such as Southern California Gas work with residential accounts, not commercial/business accounts [I have both].
...

In that case I would suggest you give my earlier suggestion about using the biller's Autopay feature some more consideration. Usually their way of directly debiting the bill from your checking account is free. Even using a credit card to pay your bill is free on most billers (check the fine print!)

Quicken Anja

@Greydog9928 Thank you for your prompt response.

We will go ahead and reach out to our escalation team then to proceed with escalating this issue in pursuit of a resolution. Unfortunately, I will not have an ETA available for this, however, as we move forward, I will follow up with you once I have more details available to share with you and/or if necessary, collect more information from you.

Thank you!

Greydog9928

Ok... I dont know what is going on.  Beginning of the month, I have new Check Pays available.  I went to pay some bills, and I have to reconfirm my 2 payment accounts with microdeposits again like I did when I first started payments this way.