Amex eBill constantly needing reverification

checkyourmirrors

I'm venting a bit and I'm trying out the Quicken Billpay because BofA Direct Connect is going away. I've added my Amex cards for eBill and had them linked, however every couple of days they have an alert that they need to be reconnected so I go through that get relinked, only for it to fail again. I had a payment scheduled, which has now failed because the link broke. Any idea why this keeps happening?

This all seems related to the many connection issues people are having with Amex, Chase, etc and while I get tech improvements and roadmap, it seems Quicken was leading the way with the moving to their Express Web(?) protocol and quality assurance has taken a hit with numerous "we're still working on it". Perhaps not fair since tech problems are complicated but as a paying customer, super frustrating.

UKR

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 cannot 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 or late 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 unlink the bill and 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.

checkyourmirrors

I appreciate the pragmatic approach and I did it early enough so it wouldn't be late, my venting was about the one-stop approach to managing my finance which seems to be slowly slipping away with these challenges, not all banks having connectivity, etc, etc. I filled out the roadmap survey today and can only hope....

Chris_QPW

Unless something drastically changes in our financial system I would say that there isn't any hope for this to ever work smoothly.  This is a fundamental problem with the overall system.

A system like Quicken Bill Manager is setup to fail.  It was failing when it was "Online Bills" only, and it will continue to fail as long as it depends on trying to log into no standardized biller websites.  And all of the billers in the US aren't going to change for this.

And the one system that has proved effective which Direct Connect is an example of where the personal finance software is really just a GUI for the financial institution's bill pay system is not in the protocol that they are adopting (FDX).  And they have stated one reason it isn't there is because of security.  The financial institutions don't trust programs like Quicken with the anything more than "read-only".