Auto Enter Bills not working

mborda

I have the windows subscription version of quicken. I set up a manual bill to auto enter the transaction 0 days in advance. The "use only business days" is not checked. But quicken isn't entering the transaction and it shows overdue on the bills & income tab.

Jim_Harman

Let's do a couple of experiments.

If a bill is showing as Overdue and you click on Enter, does the Reminder get recorded in your register?

If you set it to auto enter 1 day in advance, does the auto enter work correctly?

mborda

I didn't see an option to click enter. But when I refreshed the account, the charge was showing on my account and was matched to scheduled bill. Which leads me to my question....For manual scheduled bills, does quicken wait to see the charge when the account is updated before entering in the register? I thought it would record to the register regardless.

Jim_Harman

The option to click Enter for a reminder is in the list of upcoming Reminders on the Bills & Income tab and also on the Reminders tab at the bottom of the account's register, when you click on the Reminder. If you are using Bill Manager or Bank Bill Pay, it will say Pay instead of Enter. If you have any earlier reminders for that payee that have not been accepted or skipped, there will be no Pay or Enter option, you must accept or skip the earlier transaction first.

When you say "refreshed" or "updated" you mean "ran a One Step Update", right?

For Reminders that are set to "Auto enter", Quicken does not wait for you to run a One Step Update. I am not sure exactly what triggers it, but the pending transaction should disappear from the list of Reminders on the Bills & Income tab and appear in the account's Register.

It is possible there is an issue if you set the auto enter to 0 days in advance, that is why I suggested trying setting it to 1 day in advance.

mborda

Thanks for your input but I'm not experiencing anything you describe.

Re: "option to click enter for a reminder is in the list of upcoming reminders on the bills & income tab" - I still don't see that option. Within the option column of the tab, there is only an "edit" button which simply takes me to my reminder setup. There is also a drop down next to the edit button, and the options I have are 1) Pay with bill manager, 2) skip this once and 3) delete this instance and all future instances.

I also don't see a reminder tab within the account's register.

As a test, I set a Sept 1 bill to auto enter 2 days in advance (Aug 30). I made this change yesterday (Aug 29). When I go to the bills & income tab today (Aug 30), the transaction has not been auto entered and instead has a "due soon" message. And once again, I have no button, or option to enter the transaction. I can only edit, or perform one of the 3 actions I mentioned above.

Jim_Harman

Do you have overdue reminders for this payee? That would explain why you don't see the Enter or Pay options. You must accept or skip earlier reminders before you enter or pay new ones.

mborda

I do not have overdue reminders for this payee. The "due next on" date is 9/1/22. And I have it set to auto enter 2 days in advance (which is today), but quicken has not recorded it to the register. Nor do I have the option to click enter. I can only edit or select one of the three options above.

Jim_Harman

You might try deleting and re-creating the reminder to see if that fixes it.

mborda

I tried creating test (fake) bills. On the bills & income tab, I select "+" then "manual bill". After inserting my pay to information, I entered 9/1/2022 as the due next on date. I entered my amount and account. Under optional settings, I selected automatically enter the transaction 1 days before. I did this all on Aug 30th.

Quicken neither auto entered the transaction in the register 1 day before (Aug 31) or the day of (9/1) and it shows as overdue on the bills & income tab. Once again, I have no option to click "enter" - only "edit" and the three options I mentioned above.

I've also had other "real" bills clear the bills & income tab only when I perform the 1 step update and the transaction is downloaded and matched.

In conclusion, it seems my bills will only record in the register when able to match to a transaction during the 1 step update. And I want them to auto record regardless of whether the one step update is performed. This is peculiar.

UKR

If you haven't done so already, please try the following actions:

• Even if you are on the latest software level already, download and install the latest Mondo Patch file from https://www.quicken.com/support/update-and-mondo-patch-20182019-release-quicken-windows-subscription-product to ensure your Quicken software is up to date and correctly installed.
• Reboot Windows.
• Validate and Supervalidate your Quicken data file.
• If nothing helps, try to restore your Quicken data file from an Automatic or Manual backup taken just prior to the problems first occurring.

 

Validate and Supervalidate instructions

First save a backup file prior to performing these steps

Validate: 

1. File
2. Validate and Repair File...
3. Validate File
4. Click OK
5. Close the Data Log
6. Close Quicken (leave it closed for at least 30 secs)
7. Reopen Quicken and see if the issue persists.

Super Validate:

1. File
2. Hold CTRL + Shift and click Validate and Repair File...
3. Supervalidate File
4. Click OK
5. Close the Data Log
6. Close Quicken (leave it closed for at least 30 secs)
7. Reopen Quicken and see if the issue persists.

TimothyB

This is the typical answer you'll get from tech support. The solution I've found is to go into Edit-> Preferences -> Navigation. Under the Bills, Income & Transfers header you'll see a check box to combine the three categories. When ever my transactions fail to auto enter I go to this location and check or uncheck the box. For me this enters any of the auto transactions that were stuck. I have to do this frequently and would classify it as a bug that needs fixing.

tntgalx10

This happens to anyone who doesn't use (open the app) at least once a day, or leave the program open and running in the background all the time. Every day meaning 1x every 24 hours - not less! Quicken fails to understand that if you set a manual bill/reminder to "automatically enter transaction in the register 1 days ahead," (insert any "days" scenario)... if you don't open Quicken on THE DAY (24 hr clock) that is actually "1 day ahead"... Quicken is too dumb/unevolved to realize that if the current date is PAST the "1 day ahead" date... it will not automatically enter it in your transaction. Ridiculous, right? Yes. And it gets worse:

So for your example above... Aug 30 (xxx time of day/night) you set up that transaction to automatically enter 1 day ahead. You said that Quicken "didn't auto enter it on Aug 31 or on 9/1" -- 1) if you created it... say... at 10am Aug 30, and opened up Quicken on Aug 31 at 9am (not 24 hours yet)... Quicken too dumb and will not have entered it. 2) OR, like I was saying in first paragraph... if you didn't open up Quicken at all again until 9/1... transactions will not have automatically entered - because 9/1 is *past* the "1 day before" date for the Aug 31 bill.

Quicken has no sense of calendar days. The quicken "day" starts on the day and TIME you do something that relates to "days." And once that "day" has passed, forget about it - those auto-entries are dead to Quicken.

Hopefully this makes sense - not that it is acceptable, it definitely isn't! I've been using Quicken since 1999... and since there really isn't a robust competitor, whoever owns it now (intuit? mint? doesn't matter) just does not really care about good programming, because they don't have to (old timers like me will continue to hack their way through Quicken because Mint/Money/Quickbooks are poor solutions for this niche personal user, and they know this).

Nor is there ever any real "tech support" unless you're asking something incredibly simple that has a black and white answer (aka, not a power-user question). Thank goodness for human REAL users who respond (I've never gotten any Quicken solution to a problem, from Quicken Tech Support. Period. If I hear "Validate and Repair file" one more time... )

But what can we expect from software development that thinks "Payee" is the same thing/column as "Description," in Reports. The word PAYEE isn't available in a Report (and we should know that and be fine with it, right? So obvious! lol)

AHHHH!

DMX

As a NON-Quicken "Bill Pay" customer, I'm having the same problem. Could it be that the Auto Enter feature only works if I'm paying for and using Quicken's "Bill Pay" service? In other words, has this feature been disabled in order to get Quicken users to pay for their Quicken's "Bill Pay" service?

jnprop

@Jim_Harman  there is no "enter" option on manual bills that are set to auto enter. Never has been, never will be. The program is supposed to enter them. the only option is to edit, skip or delete. I have this problem with manual bills not entering. Which is nuts, as this is an ancient feature that used to work when everything else didn't. 

@TimothyB this did nothing for mine. Dang!

jnprop

@tntgalx10 This is an interesting theory.  I leave Quicken open & running all the time. I have some auto enter bills that work and some that don't. For something that is such an old feature that I never had any issues with, it seems like something that was caused recently with updates or something. It used to be a feature that would work when nothing else did. I think I have been using Quicken about as long as you!  I  feel as you do about it general. It has so much potential but ......

BeastofRMC

@UKR your method worked for me. Not sure exactly which step, but I had to reinstall Quicken from scratch as there was a registry issue and the Mondo patch wouldn't install. After reinstalling and applying the Mondo patch, the validate function found 2 corrupted bill reminders - I think they were plugging up the works and preventing other reminders from auto entering. Everything is now auto entering as it should! Thank you!