Bank of America....EWC+ Connection

Greg_the_Geek

@L_K, you need to find a new bank that still supports Direct Connect.

Mark1104

@L_K - a few things

1) the 'pending' feature was turned off due to all the bugs and customer frustations, so you won't see it in the downloaded transactions. It was turned off earlier this week (maybe Tuesday?)

2) how are you setting up the Billpay transactions? Are you using Quicken Billpay (and if so, why) or are you using Bofa's BillPay on their website / app? if you are using BofA to set up the BillPay transactions, then you know they are already set up :-)  

I guess what I am getting at is that QUicken is not state of the art technology.  It may have been when I began using it 28 years ago.    

BofA has very powerful tools to manage finances.  The app is highly regarded in the banking industry.  Just 3 clicks on their app and I can see ALL my Billpay transactions (and I don't make that many anymore).  1) click to open the app (faceID recognizes me), 2) click the Bill Pay button at the bottom of the App, 3) click the 'activity' link at the top of the screen.  that is it! Takes less than 10 seconds to access.   That didn't exist when Quicken designed its technology 30+ years ago. 

frankly, I can see BofA's rationale.  EWC+ is an effort to enhance the security of who can download transactions.   Since the BillPay transactions come from a totally different source that feeds into the Banking system, I could see BofA saying, "all the BillPay transactions are available on our website and our app and is easy to access, so why spend the money to provide additional capability to download these transactions THAT HAVE YET TO OCCUR? 

 further, fewer and fewer customers use BillPay - as I noted above, the world of most everyone accepting debit/ credit cards, ACH, auto-debit (with better protections than years ago), Zelle, simply reduces the number of BillPay transactions and therefore the incentive for banks to invest the money to permit aggregators such as Intuit and Quicken to download these transactions - which just increases risk in a risk adverse world.  


How many BillPay transactions do you do a month and why?  is that the best method of paying bills given the changes in the industry over many years? Are there better tools that make your life easier? And that easier life may be a life without Quicken.....it's the reality of Banks improved technology versus Quicken technology which has been rather stagnant over time. (and you wonder why Intuit spun it off 6-7 years ago.....)


just my two cents

BarryGraham

Mark1104 said:

@L_K - a few things

so why spend the money to provide additional capability to download these transactions THAT HAVE YET TO OCCUR? 

So you don't go overdrawn. I don't know if this change will affect this but I rely on my credit card payments being downloaded ahead of time. I pay them by eBill from the Bank of America website but I don't keep all my money there.

Mark1104

@BarryGraham - so this is what I mean by 'tools'.  if you use the BofA app, ask "Erica" if you will overdraw your account.  It will provide a 7 days forecast of your checking account balance based on your prior usage and upcoming scheduled bills.  What you want Quicken to provide you, BofA is already providing via their app.  All you have to do is verbalize the question to Erica, you don't even have to type it. 

If we think about it from BofA's standpoint, they already give you a tool that provides a forecast, have investing money in that, which engages you as a customer, so why spend money to provide future bills to Quicken? 

the ebills will no longer download to quicken "ahead of time" - that is the 'shock' of the new Quicken experience. they won't download into Quicken until they are paid. 

Gopher651

BoA bill pay also includes functions "e-bills" and "notifications". All but two of my normal payees support e-bills. The payee sends my bill to BoA and BoA sends me an email of a bill due. When I visit the website bill pay, there us a bill set up with payee, due date and bill amount. I can change date and amount if needed. I click pay. Don't have to search payees. Quicken could even make this easier. They could include a bank web link attached to the Quicken account and even log you in if credentials included in the Quicken vault. Maybe even scrape the bill pay web screen for an entry in Quicken.

Robert Ralyea

I hope quicken can fix the problem of bills in processing state bc you can’t pay the next bill from the quicken bill manager while Q is in processing state.. interesting I had one bill today go into paid status which not allows me to pay the next month bill. I see no complaints about this and Q has never responded to this issue I have posted.

Robert Ralyea

mark1194
The only issue and it is extra work is BOA doesn’t let you enter future income so you can see future balances.

Mark1104

@Robert Ralyea

if it is 'extra work', what is the alternative? 

best bet is
a) enter the future income that is recurring as reminders in Quicken; it will be in the register
b) move away from BillPay - there are a lot of alternative (and safe methods) that exist today: debit cards, credit cards, autodebit.
c) set up the remaining bill pays as recurring expenses in Quicken - even if it is not exactly the same each month (e.g. utlitity bill), it can be 'close enough' to provide a good estimate of the future balance to avoid overdrawing the acct.


thinking of it from the Bank's perspective, appears it was not worth them investing all the money to provide users with future BillPay payments (hey, they don't know what checks you are writing which presumably you are manually entering in Quicken in any event)
 

mshiggins

BarryGraham said:

Mark1104 said:

@L_K - a few things

so why spend the money to provide additional capability to download these transactions THAT HAVE YET TO OCCUR? 

So you don't go overdrawn. I don't know if this change will affect this but I rely on my credit card payments being downloaded ahead of time. I pay them by eBill from the Bank of America website but I don't keep all my money there.

Barry, 

BofA bill pay has the ability to link other “pay from” accounts for paying bills. I have both Fidelity and Ameritrade linked as “pay from” accounts, so when I pay a bill on the BofA site, I can choose to pay from my BofA account or from any of my linked “pay from” accounts. Helpful if you don’t keep all your cash at BofA.

Rocket J Squirrel

mshiggins said:

BofA bill pay has the ability to link other “pay from” accounts for paying bills. I have both Fidelity and Ameritrade linked as “pay from” accounts, so when I pay a bill on the BofA site, I can choose to pay from my BofA account or from any of my linked “pay from” accounts. Helpful if you don’t keep all your cash at BofA.

I have noticed this feature but never set it up. How does it work? Does the payment flow from Fidelity through BofA to the payee, or directly, bypassing BofA? Does it work well, i.e., payments made on time? Is it a free service or does it cost money?

mshiggins

Rocket J Squirrel said:

mshiggins said:

BofA bill pay has the ability to link other “pay from” accounts for paying bills. I have both Fidelity and Ameritrade linked as “pay from” accounts, so when I pay a bill on the BofA site, I can choose to pay from my BofA account or from any of my linked “pay from” accounts. Helpful if you don’t keep all your cash at BofA.

I have noticed this feature but never set it up. How does it work? Does the payment flow from Fidelity through BofA to the payee, or directly, bypassing BofA? Does it work well, i.e., payments made on time? Is it a free service or does it cost money?

Payment flow is direct from the “pay from” account to the biller. The number of days it takes to process the payment is the same whether the source is BofA or a “pay from” account. It is a free service. I’ve been using it for several years and it works great! 

I used to have to do a lot more cash flow planning and transfer money between accounts to ensure I had funds available to pay bills. Using the linked “pay from” feature drastically simplified that process.

Chris_QPW

That Bank of America feature seems pretty good, I don't think Chase has it, but then again, I don't use Chase's bill pay system so I wouldn't be the right one to judge that.

I wanted mention for "cash flow" I have one of the simplest.  With the exception of my utilities, HOA, property taxes, credit cards everything is paid automatically from my credit card (Properties taxes aren't automatic but are paid online at their site from my checking account).

That means other than keeping enough the checking account for these that come directly out of the checking account all I have to do is look at the statement for the credit card when it comes in the email and make sure I have enough to cover it when the payment comes due, which gives me plenty of time to do it.

mshiggins

Chris_QPW said:

That Bank of America feature seems pretty good, I don't think Chase has it, but then again, I don't use Chase's bill pay system so I wouldn't be the right one to judge that.

I wanted mention for "cash flow" I have one of the simplest.  With the exception of my utilities, HOA, property taxes, credit cards everything is paid automatically from my credit card (Properties taxes aren't automatic but are paid online at their site from my checking account).

That means other than keeping enough the checking account for these that come directly out of the checking account all I have to do is look at the statement for the credit card when it comes in the email and make sure I have enough to cover it when the payment comes due, which gives me plenty of time to do it.

Chris,

I am too much of a control freak to allow billers to auto-debit my accounts. I do pay all the bills I can with credit cards to rack up rewards points.

Chris_QPW

@mshiggins I quite understand.  As with most things in life, what is great for one person might not be the best for another.  And letting go is quite hard.  Since Chase dropped Direct Connect, I haven't been using Quicken for my finances, and boy is it a strange feeling not to startup Quicken every day and update after all the years of doing it!

A_long_time_user

unfortunately i agree with you. i've been using quicken since the dawn of time and am coming to the conclusion its loosing its usefulness. this chase mess is the final straw. while it appears this problem goes back to late august in the comments, i am not aware of any better explanation than "we are working on it and don't have an ETA" or some such. Transparency by quicken as to what the problem is, what they are doing about it, and an estimate of when it would be fixed would go a long way. it looks like i need to start looking for a plan B

Robert Ralyea

The fact that Q is now silent worries me. The moderators are between a rock and hard place. Management needs to give these people some positive news. At the end of the month I will no longer use bill manager. If they just fixed the problem to clear all the previous bills of processing state I would be happy.

Chris_QPW

Robert Ralyea said:

The fact that Q is now silent worries me. The moderators are between a rock and hard place. Management needs to give these people some positive news. At the end of the month I will no longer use bill manager. If they just fixed the problem to clear all the previous bills of processing state I would be happy.

Does this information help?
Managing Bank Bill Pay and Transfers after Direct Connect Discontinuation

Note just so people know, I actually have no problem making Express Web Connect + work with my accounts, I just refuse to use Express Web Connect + for different reasons.

Mark1104

@mshiggins - I totally understand your 'control freak' approach and not permitting auto-debit, but it is the way of the world with more and more of it occuring.  The banks are out to crush any form of paper check - which is really why they developed Zelle - but BillPay CAN BE just another form of paper check, so it's part of the 'monster' the banks are fighting. 

As I noted in a post above, CFPBs actions since the Great Recession, makes the issues of auto-debit less of a concern than they were previously.  The legal protections are not as airtight as using a credit card, but as long as you follow the process, you are protected. 

 

dnag

SIAP-in this thread:
So, is there any way to download "pending" bill pay transactions manually from BOA bill pay?

I use BOA on-line billpay, so not scheduling within Q is fine. But, I really got used to "pending" transitions downloading (and showing as blank status in the cleared/Reconciled column) of the Quicken register for the account.

W/out the pending transactions - my "current balance" in Quicken really isn't right.

It's kinda a pain to have to check the on-line status of any pending transactions just to know my "real" account balance at any time... as you all know -- it can be over a week for some bill pays to move from "pending" to actually released....

I rarely (if ever) had any problems with "pending" transactions - and didn't really understand that this would change when they went from DC/ to ExpressDC.......

Chris_QPW

dnag said:

SIAP-in this thread:
So, is there any way to download "pending" bill pay transactions manually from BOA bill pay?

No.  People are confusing pending transactions with scheduled bill payments, they aren't the same thing, so even if Quicken brings back the feature to download pending transactions you will not get the schedule bill payments synced to Quicken with anything other than Direct Connect.

Pending transactions are transactions that have got to the financial institution but have yet to post.

Scheduled bill payments are in the bill payment system at your financial institution.

EDIT: I have never seen any manual system for downloading transactions from the bill payment systems on financial institutions.

SECOND UPDATE: I was just thinking, if the scheduled reminders can be downloaded in a CSV format, then they could be converted to QIF format and imported.  I'm not really sure how much that would help though since it seems like just as easy to enter the transaction into the register or setup a reminder (or have a reminder for a repeating transaction and update the amount).

fanfare

Enter bank-scheduled repeating payments under Bills & Income,
The Projected Balances View will tell you if you are running out of funds, if you don't keep a large enough cushion in your bank account.
Bank of America requires a large cushion to avoid monthly fees, anyway.

(Bills, Income & Transfers (Stack View) is my Quicken Opening page, lately replacing the Checking account).

Robert Ralyea

Greg-the- Geek

we are all aware that BOA dropped direct connect and this is not Quickens fault. Let’s move past that. What happened to downloading transactions and cleaning processing transactions so we can continue to enter manual transactions.

Greg_the_Geek

@Robert Ralyea, I have no idea what you're talking about. EWC+ supports downloading transactions and you can always enter manual transactions.

Robert Ralyea

EWC+ does download my transactions but the register status stay’s in processing and you can’t pay bills with Quicken bill manager or even delete future bills or reconcile the download. I have had only one download transaction come up as paid all the rest for the past month are still in processing status. 

Greg_the_Geek

Sorry, I can't help you there since I don't use Quicken Bill Manager.

Chris_QPW

Greg_the_Geek said:

Sorry, I can't help you there since I don't use Quicken Bill Manager.

I wonder if there is any SuperUser using the Quicken Bill Manager, I sort of doubt it.  I wouldn't touch myself, I don't trust it.

Robert Ralyea

Greg

i have all my November bills setup with Boa for November bills . I still have one outstanding bill being paid with Quicken bill manager. I get an error message with garbled characters when I try to cancel and I can’t turn off bill manager with that outstanding bill. I can’t add manual transactions until that bill is paid. Interesting on Saturday one bill downloaded from Boa and it’s register status is paid. Thanks for your reply to my comments.

Greg_the_Geek

I would suggest trying Quicken Customer Support.

Official Quicken® Support - Phone, Chat, or Community

Mark1104

@fanfare - it's more complicated than just the balances.... if you have one of the older accounts, then yes, minimum or average balances avoid the fees; however, if you have the newer 'advantage' accounts, direct deposit, loans with the bank or wealth management accounts can also avoid the fee (and if you are a retiree, you avoid the fee, regardless of balance!)

fanfare

@Mark1104 thanks for the clue, but I see nothing at Bank of America website about retiree or senior citizen waiver of monthly fees. Is there a trick?
Or do I have to visit a branch in person ?
Anyway that was just an aside, it is not really germane to the issue of tracking your monthly bills.