Quicken sends online payment as check instead of ACH

gsakal02134

My Visa card was compromised back in January, and a new card was issued. I continued making online payments using the Online Payee containing the old card number. These payments always processed as ACH transactions.

I found that I couldn't update the existing Chase Card Services payee with the new card number, even though there were no pending payments, so I created a new payee with the new card number, modifying the "Description" field to distinguish it from the old payee.

I made a test payment of $100 on my account, which Quicken sent (through my bank's Direct Connect service) as a check.

My question: Why did Quicken send this as a check (it got an online check number) instead of as an ACH transaction? Will subsequent payments be processed as ACH transactions? How does Quicken decide how a payment should process?

Thanks,
Greg

Boatnmaniac

Hi @gsakal02134 . My understanding of your question:  You sent a bill pay command to your bank via Quicken Direct Connect for a new Online Payee (for the new credit card number).  Instead of your bank sending the payment via ACH it sent it as a numbered check.  Is this correct?

Assuming my understanding is correct:  I do not believe Quicken has anything to do with telling the bank which method is to be used in making a payment.  I suggest you check with your bank to see what their bill pay terms are.  If they are like the terms of my banks (3 of them), they say that they will make the determination as to which payment method will be used.  They will use ACH if/when the Payee ACH information is available and will pay by check when it is not available.  So neither I nor Quicken has any say as to which payment method is used.  I suspect your bank has the same payment terms.

As to why you now get a check number with your download when you did not before:  My guess is that if payments were sent by ACH before then this last payment was also sent by ACH.  You might want to log into your online account and see if there is an image of a check you can view or if it simply has a check number referenced with no image.  My banks always assign a check number to every bill pay payment but the payments sent by ACH will not have a check image shown in my online account register.  When a check image is available then I know an actual check was mailed.  I'm guessing your bank does the same thing.

As to why you are now getting a check number downloaded when you did not before:  It could be that the bank made a change to their software or to what data they are now including in the downloads to Quicken.  Or it could be that the Memorized Payee settings for the old Online Payee and the new Online Payee are different.  But the reason for this might be difficult to determine.