I love quicken, I wish bill pay worked better

ITVGuy2000

Some bills are updated, most are not. 4 of my 10 bills are in Needs Attention State. This is not useful.

T-Mobile: Your bill has been successfully added, but your next amount due is not yet available from your biller. Yes it is. I have never been able to successfully pay this bill through quicken.
Chase: Account is locked. I have logged in and resolved this, but it keeps going back to being locked.
Aqua: Your bill has been successfully added, but your next amount due is not yet available from your biller. Yes it is. I have never been able to successfully pay this bill through quicken.
XFinity: Your bill has been successfully added, but your next amount due is not yet available from your biller. Yes it is.

I can see scheduled bills in my register, they do not show up in the recent payments panal to the right. Strangely they do show up in my Upcoming Bills, even though I scheduled the payment through quickpay.

Also, at least once or twice a month I get a failed status in my register for bills what were scheduled with quickpay. 

And so on. I have been fighting with getting bill pay to work in quicken for months. This is WAY more effort than it is worth. It has not made my life easier, even though it promises to do so. I love the concept. The execution is broken. I am in the process if giving up. I have setup all my bill pay in Bank of America. I have enabled Personal Capital to have access to all my accounts. Categories, planning, net worth, investments, etcetera. All there between the two. It's been a long run. And I have tried to be a quicken defender/advocate here and elsewhere. I love quicken and don't want to go, but too many missed bills and late fees. Too much time hassling with something that should just work.

Pumphouse

This describes my situation as well. It is more trouble than it is worth so I am backing away from it. I will probably downgrade my subscription since my recent upgrade was done in order to use Bill Pay.

UKR

Be sure to avoid late fees and penalty interest rates

Are you about to be late with making your bill payment due to problems or unexpected delays in Quicken Bill Manager (Quick Pay or Check Pay) that can't be resolved in a timely fashion?

Due to the complexity of the matter it can take apparently forever to identify and fix a problem. While you're fighting the Bill Manager windmill, waiting for the problems to be resolved, to avoid missed payments I recommend you logon directly to the biller's website and authorize them to direct debit (aka PAC Draft, Autopay, APS, etc.) the next and perhaps all future payments from your checking account or a credit card. The biller will do all the work for you and make an electronic debit on the due date and you don't have to worry about being late.

In Quicken just record a scheduled reminder which does not execute as an online payment into your account register on or before the Due Date and before you download transactions from the bank or credit card containing the payment transaction. That will allow Quicken to match your register transaction to the downloaded data and not cause any further issues.

Mark&Kristine Thompson

I'm in the same boat as ITVGuy2000. I have experienced many of the same problems since the beginning of Bill Manager launch and have hung in there thinking that the bugs would eventually be worked out. Unfortunately that is not happening, and now with CHASE abandoning its relationship with Quicken for quickpay, that's two more credit card bills that I can't pay through quicken bill manager. The checkpay option is terrible. Bills paid that way take 10 days to 2 weeks to arrive typically, and sometimes they never get paid. So, I'm looking for alternatives. Does anyone have any recommendations for other online bill pay software? I can set up my Citi bank account for bill payment services, but the one feature that is missing is the ability to see scheduled payments in the ledger so that I can look ahead a couple of weeks and be sure that incoming funds during that period will cover the scheduled payments.

ITVGuy2000

My solutions. I set up everything as a reminder, and unlinked all billers. I go to each biller website when the reminder triggers, and use Bank Of America Bill Pay to pay bills directly.

Regarding Personal Capital, I have closed this account as well. Too many uncertainties regarding the data presented. And it sure didn't help that all the focus is on getting me to sign up for a managed account. I knew this, but I thought we could work around it, or maybe I would sign up for a managed account. Just the attitude of the person I was talking to. He had no interest in my questions about the tool. Only selling. Yep. seems I am still here.

It's a shame, I really wanted the Bills/Quickpay feature to work. I give up.

Chris_QPW

My take this is that being able to "pay from Quicken" is way overrated.
Yes, if you use manual reminders and your financial institution's bill pay system you have to do "twice the entries", but it really isn't that much once you have setup the manual reminders to repeat on the payment schedule.

In practice I don't even do that.  What I do it setup my bills to be paid automatically from my credit card when possible, and when not possible like for utilities, I have them automatically paid from my checking account.

Given that most of them flow through the credit card, I don't even bother to put in manual reminders for them unless they are quite large since the "cash flow" is more about just having enough in my checking account to pay the credit card balance.  So, the important reminders are the ones that affect the checking account, not the credit card.

With this system my finances are quite "boring" since pretty much everything is automatic.

ITVGuy2000

I have had issues with Autodraft in the past causing checks to bounce and then stuff cascading from there. That's from a long time ago, so probably not an issue to be concerned with these days. However I still like the idea and illusion of being in control of my money. Quickpay capitalized on that illusion. Everything run through my bill paying software and me in control with a nice graphical dashboard. Unfortunately not everyone is playing by quickens rules, so it tends not to work. Mostly. Bottom line Chris_QPW is that you are right. I just haven't fully embraced not being in control of everything yet. It takes some steps to get there.
Also, when you think of it, the bill pay stuff was Quickens latest new feature that justified is current pricing. So if I am not using it.... hmmm is it really worth the most recent price increases to my subscription?  I guess I am okay if it is solid, stable and improving. But it's borderline.