Quicken Bill Manager is NOT a suitable replacement for using bank bill-pay

JeremyGNJ

I am really trying to use Quicken Bill Manager so I can switch over to Bank of America new EWC+, but quicken Bill Manager is lacking so many features and functionality. That plus the degradation of quicken functionality it might be the end of me using Quicken.

Bill Pay is arguably the biggest reason I have used quicken for like 16 years. My workflow used to be like this:
1. Whenever I feel like it, I click on a credit card account and reconcile.
2. After I reconcile, a window would automatically pop up asking if I wanted to make a payment to this account.
3. The window was pre-filled with my bank's "Online Payee" for this credit card account, and the amount was pre-filled to the amount due.
4. All I did was review the $ amount and click "sent" and the bill was paid.
5. I could do this ANY TIME I wanted, If I was going on vacation and wanted to pay my bills early, I could use the same workflow. If I got a bonus check from work, I could pay off credit cards with it using this simple process.

The whole thing was SO easy that it took almost no time to keep all my accounts paid. But not the whole experience is terrible.

- I added quicken bill manager, and my Chase Credit cards only show up as "check pay" not "quick pay". All my reading says Chase should be supported by quick pay, but no for me. This should be the simplest thing.
- I can find no way at all to initiate a payment to a payee until the bill is due. There's no way to make a payment early?
- There is no way to link a manual reminder to a check-pay action? When I add a reminder for my car loan the "pay from account" doesn't allow me to link a quick-bill pay payee? I don't understand why not.
- Quicken in general no longer shows any pop-up to pay an account after reconciliation. I have to hunt for it in the bill list, or go to 'write or print checks'. What used to be easy is now tedious and unintuitive.
- I have no idea how to use "write and print checks" to pay a bill or an ad-hoc payee from the quicken bill manager. It just doesn't show up anywhere as a pay-from account.

Maybe I'm [Removed - Language], maybe people will reply with how easy it is, but it doesn't work anywhere near the same as I've been using quicken to pay bills, and there is no clear explanation for any of it.

Ps56k2

Yup .. feel your pain -
 as a Chase bill pay user - 
Now, back to the double entry prior to using Quicken Reminders + bill pay … 

Chris_QPW

First off here is Quicken Inc's take on this:
https://www.quicken.com/support/quicken-connectivity-updates-and-bill-pay

Note I don't use Quicken Bill Manager, but here are some details on how it works from what I have seen and reported on here:
https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7916268/my-explanation-of-the-different-term-services-that-quicken-has-provides-and-provided-in-the-past

And I think your summary is quit accurate, but I can answer at least one of your questions.

- I added quicken bill pay, and my Chase Credit cards only show up as "check pay" not "quick pay".

It has been reported by the Moderators that QuickPay is no longer available for Chase since the change over to Express Web Connect +.  You aren't some exception.

- I can find no way at all to initiate a payment to a payee until the bill is due. 

From what I know the third party that provides this service built the bill paying on top of their "bill presentment" system.  As in a system that goes to the biller's website and get the bill's statement balance and date, and is the "online bill" which can be separate or linked to a reminder that it will change the amount and date based on this information.  As such, I take it that they base any payments on that amount/date.  I don't know if it would have any bearing on the bill pay, but with credit cards the bill presentment will allow showing the minimum due.

- Quicken in general no longer shows any pop-up to pay an account after reconcile. 

When any reconcile is done for a credit card there is a pop-up message asking if you want to pay it off.  This might have got turned off.  If you select Edit -> Preferences -> "Alerts & Messages" -> Reset Quicken Warnings, that might get you the prompt back.  But I suspect what you are really after is a prompt for it to actually schedule a payment not just put in a transfer/transaction that is local to Quicken.  I don't know for sure, but I suspect that Quicken Bill Manager doesn't have that kind of tie in currently.

Maybe others that actually use Quicken Bill Manager can provide better answers.

edenjw

i agree with your comments. Quicken bill pay does not work as advertised. My Capital One credit card statements don't appear although they are available on the Capital One site. Chase credit cards are only payable through check pay, not quick pay. I will be trying Citibank cards as well, but I don't hold out much hope. I will be using my bank's website bill pay until this improves, which means doing double entry. The change from BOA and Chase is a big step backwards for Quicken users.

UKR

About your Bill Manager issues

My 2cents' worth, if I may:

I don't use Bill Pay services or Bill Manager at all, neither the one from Quicken nor the one offered by my bank. Since time "B.I." (before the Internet was invented) I have set up almost all of my recurring payments as Direct Debit, PAC Draft, Autopay, APS, whatever the biller calls it. Using the biller's website, I authorized the biller to electronically debit each payment directly from my checking or credit card account on due date. Now I can sit back, relax and wait for it to happen. Instead of  having to arm-wrestle Bill Manager into making payment on time I let the biller do all the work for me.

When I get notified of a new statement having arrived, usually by email, all I have to do in Quicken is to run a regular scheduled reminder to record the transaction. Haven't missed a payment in many years, even while traveling overseas.

I recommend you do the same instead of fighting the Bill Manager windmill, missing payments and getting slapped with penalty interest rates or late fees.

DKJ

Totally agree with original poster. I too have used Quicken for more than 15 years. It has always had a ton of quirks, and a lot of development problems, but there was usually a way around them. But this is a bridge too far. I've already decided to and set up bill pay using my bank instead. And will be going to more direct debits. Too bad. But you can be sure in the future that Quicken will be changing the pricing policy for Bill Manager. Note the wording on your account page: you have ACCESS to Bill Manager until mm/dd/yy. At some point you can be sure that Access will come with a fee. My subscription is up in Feb, so at least I have time to find a reasonable alternative. So sad to say goodbye to a piece of software that has been at the center of my financial records for a very, very long time.

Levoy H

I'm probably the longest user of Quicken in this thread - clear back to the DOS days!  (In many ways I miss the simplicity of those days.)  This can only be viewed as a huge step backwards for Quicken. Yes, Quicken helps me organize my many accounts, but nowadays there are many options for that - and most are cheaper.  Like the OP said, what has really kept me in the Quicken camp all these years has been the ability to easily move money around from within Quicken - whenever and wherever I could always take care of business.  No internet connection?  No problem - just enter the transactions in the register and do an OSU as soon as I was connected.  Yes, there have been quirks and issues, but they got fixed.  Finally, I've seen a number of posts trying to pin the blame on Chase, while others blame Quicken.  You know what?  I don't care. We're the Customers, and we're the ones paying the price.  

Finally, finally, I've seen rumors that some of the old functionality may be brought back.  That would be nice, but as others have said, the clock is ticking, and I'm shopping.  

starunit

Not sure what my path forward will be. I've put up with Quicken's quirks since moving from MS Money (2009?).
I will NOT be sending payment info through a third-party (too many times I've seen reports of data breaches). For now I'll continue to download transactions into my Quicken, and will start using my bank's ePay system, or something.
I understand there may be problems aligning to different data-format standards, but for the cost we pay for the subscription license the major financial institutions should be handled. <disappointed face>

Chris_QPW

starunit said:

I understand there may be problems aligning to different data-format standards, but for the cost we pay for the subscription license the major financial institutions should be handled. <disappointed face>

This isn't a lack of data-format standards.

Each financial institution decides what connection methods they will allow, and each of those connection methods have certain functions that they can perform.

This is no different than if you decided to access your financial institution with a Mobile App and and a Web browser and found that you could do something in the web browser, but couldn't do it in the Mobile App.  Nothing you could do as a user would change that.  Quicken Inc/Intuit can't access data that the financial institution hasn't made available to them.

Direct Connect/OFX allowed access to data and commands that the Express Web Connect+/FDX protocol will not make available.  And that isn't an accident.  As the financial institutions have gotten more concerned about hacking they don't like the idea that an application that isn't under their direct control can issue commands to send payments and do transfers.

starunit

> @Chris_QPW said:
> This isn't a lack of data-format standards.
>
> Each financial institution decides what connection methods they will allow, and each of those connection methods have certain functions that they can perform.
>

I wrote a lengthy response, but before sending I caught myself and deleted it. It doesn't matter.

MangoMan

Have to agree. Used to be so easy to pay bills with my BOA account. Bottom line is this was a way for Quicken to cut costs - They admit it - "Quicken Bill Manager is priced to be inexpensive or free to users (depending on their Quicken tier) and breakeven for Quicken."

Ps56k2

MangoMan said:

Have to agree. Used to be so easy to pay bills with my BOA account. Bottom line is this was a way for Quicken to cut costs - They admit it - "Quicken Bill Manager is priced to be inexpensive or free to users (depending on their Quicken tier) and breakeven for Quicken."

Nope .. it was the banking world that forced the migration to EWC+ which doesn’t support the DC 2-way upload protocol … and Quicken was trying to support bill payment when their own vendor decided to no longer support that side of their business… 

Chris_QPW

@virtualwatts The bottom line is that you are going to have to change your ways in someway.
Possible solutions:

1. Change banks to one that still supports Direct Connect/Bank bill pay.
2. Enter reminders, manual entries in Quicken for each of your future scheduled payments and match them to downloaded transactions when they clear the bank.
3. Change by going to the biller's websites and setup automatic payments from a credit card if possible or your checking account.  Cashflow is much easier if the payments go through a credit card.  Schedule reminders as needed to predict the future.
4. Last, and certainly least in my opinion, go with Quicken Bill Manager to schedule your payments.

DKJ

As I understand Quicken's explanation of this fiasco (https://www.quicken.com/support/quicken-connectivity-updates-and-bill-pay), there are two groups of users using some form of bill payment:

Group 1 used Quicken Bill Pay (not integrated with their bank) - I'm not in this group, so I can't be sure exactly how this worked, but it sounds like a third party partner of Quicken's handled this for Quicken, and two years ago that third party stopped the service. As a replacement, Quicken had developed their own "Quicken Bill Manager."

Group 2 used Quicken Bill pay integrated with their bank. Those of us in this group know how easy it was to set up an online bill payee and then simply enter in our Quicken register a date, payee, amount, and tell Quicken in the "Check #" column to "Send" the payment. All done. A few days later, Quicken would match the payment in the register with the data received from the bank during a One-Step Update or Account Update. Voila.

Recently Chase and B of A changed their connection method, and that method somehow doesn't "extend to Bill Pay," so for those of us in Group 2 lost that functionality we had "enjoyed for decades."

Quicken actually tried to do a solid for us in Group 2 by saying "Hey, we've got this thing called 'Bill Manager'...use it instead. Problem is that compared to the integrated Bill Pay system we have used for years, Bill Manager, not to put too fine a point on it, sucks.

Quicken says they have been working on this for several years. Really? If true, they really need someone new to take over that development effort.

Needed IMMEDIATELY:
1) Allow entering a payment for any date whether or not a bill is due. Come to think of it, what should it matter if there is even a bill that exists...just send the friggin' payment. I'm not asking Quicken to be sure I don't send money to someone who isn't expecting it.

2) Allow us simply to transfer our existing Online Payee list to new Check Pay or Quick Pay payees. Really, not having this functionality from the beginning is simply laziness on Quicken's development team's part. Make us type in 20+ payee's addresses and account numbers again? C'mon. If there is more data you need us to fill in, or if you need somehow to confirm it with payee as we enter it, then ask only for the new data and confirm it. But to force us to re-enter what we've already done when you have that data in the application, wow.

Needed ASAP:
1)Check Pay vs. Quick Pay - who cares? I don't care if you mail a check or send it electronically...if one takes up to 5 days, and one takes 1 day, just tell me. We already know that some vendors don't get payment as fast as others.

2)The other functionality as mentioned by OP and others who have spent a LOT of time trying to make Bill Manager do what they need.

For me, for now:
I've switched over to using B of A's bill payment system from the B of A site. It's a little kludgy, but I guess I'll get used to it quickly enough. And I'll continue to use Quicken for downloading from my B of A checking account, and match or complete the register transactions as they come in during the updates.

The fact is that Quicken has never failed to annoy over the years, but I haven't found anything better when it comes to consolidating all of my financial accounts, historical prices, transaction history, etc.

I just hope the new private equity buyer will bring some discipline to the development team so they can start to get ahead of the curve instead of constantly rolling out half-baked product fixes and 'upgrades' that really annoy users.

Chris_QPW

DKJ said:

Needed IMMEDIATELY:
1) Allow entering a payment for any date whether or not a bill is due. Come to think of it, what should it matter if there is even a bill that exists...just send the friggin' payment. I'm not asking Quicken to be sure I don't send money to someone who isn't expecting it.

Here my educated guess at why this works this way at all.

The third-party they are working with for Quicken Bill Manager first showed up in Quicken in 2015 as "Online Bills".  The idea here is that the third-party service would log into the biller's website and get the bill amount, date, and maybe the statement.

When the third-party service that was providing Quicken Bill Pay (which was used by people that didn't have bill pay through Direct Connect) stopped providing that service Quicken Inc scrambled to use the "full API" of the third-party service to not only do online bill presentment, but bill pay too.

So, this third-party has the model of "get the bill from the biller's website, and optionally pay it".
This is exactly the model you would expect if they were providing a service to say a financial institution that wants to allow their customers to see their bills and pay them.  It isn't the kind of setup you would expect for "just send the friggin' payment.  In other words their API was probably never designed as full blown payment system, only on getting bills and paying them.

As such, the API probably doesn't even have a "just send it" command.  Of course I could be wrong, or of course there is always the possibility that the third-party service might extend the feature set.

Steven

As a long time quicken user and BOA customer, I certainly appreciate the comments and frustrations expressed. As said above there aren't a lot of good financial management software out there that meets all our needs. Quicken for me was a program to add all my financial data (checking, savings, assets, loans, investments, etc) in one place. 

I never used quicken bill pay or quick pay system. I used the BOA online bill pay system since it first came out. Yes, I had to go to the BOA website and pay bills that way. Then when I did the update in quicken it would download the pending bill pay transactions in the check register. The main reason I did it that way was once I scheduled a payment through the BOA website payment system it then became BOA's responsibility. If for some reason the biller claims not to have received the payment, I would contact BOA to resolve the issue. And believe it or not they did. This was of course very infrequent but did occur. 

Quicken has certainly improved its software over the years but is still not perfect or will ever be. BOA online bill pay is less convenient then paying through quicken but it works reasonably well and not really difficult to use. 

Hell, I have several investment accounts in Pershing with numerous stocks, bonds, etc in each account. I don't even download from those accounts into quicken because I cannot trust quicken to download the data accurately. So, I enter the transactions manually. I do however auto update the quotes daily through quicken. Yes, a major pain to do but I'm accurate to the penny with these accounts. 

Will we eventually loss this EWC+ connection too? Probably. Would we prefer accuracy over convenience? I believe so. Can we ever achieve both from these programs. Sad to say, doubtful.

JeremyGNJ

OP here.

I know there's a lot of factors in how Quicken Bill Pay got to where it is. The point of my post is to say "quicken needs to get feature parity back to where it was". Otherwise a big piece of the value proposition isn't there for me.

Several of my banks allow me to aggregate my various accounts and credit cards to view in one place, but quick had the advantage of adding this and many other features (budgeting, life-planning, paycheck/tax analysis, etc).

If these features lose functionality, then the usefulness of quicken is reduced significantly.

My point was not to criticize, but to explain that improvement is needed, and what my specific needs are. I am also more than happy to take part in any use-studies, beta-testing or feedback systems to help Quicken mature as a product and not become irrelevant.

Mark73012

I've been using Quicken from back in the DOS days, as one other poster mentioned. I purchased my annual software upgrade religiously. I've watched a lot of features come and go. The one that I rely on one feature I really appreciated with the bill payment feature. Click-click and done. Now it's click-click, re-click, hope, pray, burn sage in hopes that nothing goes wrong. I, too, have been charged late fees because the payment was never received by the institution. The smug response from customer service was, "Schedule your payment earlier". It was scheduled 5-days earlier. I'm not sure how many weeks earlier I was supposed to advance pay. The only notification I got was a text from my bank telling me my payment had not been received by the due date. Nothing from Quicken. I'm not sure I can really trust Quicken any more. I've decided to move to my banks crappy bill management/payment service. It's kludgy and non-intuitive, but it's reliable, something Quicken cannot claim.

Randy 415

Great discussion. I agree with most all of this. My main use of Quicken (for decades), is: Consolidation of all financial info into one place, and able to make transactions also in one place (DC bill pay and transfers). If that all goes away, long-term, then either Quicken Bill Manager will have to be enhanced to replace it, or I will have to go back to my 2-step methods I used in the past (as mentioned previously).

Inman Lanier

I post this in the hopes that the Quicken management team picks up on this and takes an action to improve.

Numerous folks on this post and others regarding the IMHO abominable Web Connect + rollout have weighed in. We the user community, with the exception of 1 person I saw - are quite bothered by the step backward. Numerous of the reasons stated above are why I am disappointed. I'm an old DOS Managing Your Money client, where they did much like the olden day Quicken bill pay where checks were written and sent by MYM. I liked it because our finances were in all in one place, and the bills reliably got paid. MYM went under after their windows version was a flop. We switched to Quicken, who I later learned bought out their payment service and it worked for a while. Later I had issues with the Quicken payment system so I switched to my bank. Then direct connect became available, and we started using it - what a great, simple, reliable system. At this point in time I'm likely going to go to the cludgy double entry method - where I direct my payments out of Chase's system. I'm not the big fan of them pulling my funds then hoping and praying the check makes it - but at least I have recourse with them when something goes awry (they've tweaked theirs as issues have surfaced). What a waste for me to spend $50 plus per year to whomever now owns Quicken if I'm not enjoying the 1 stop shop.

Note to management - pay attention and bring back the reliable functions or likely lose clientele (like me). I too offer to participate in Beta testing if needed.

Inman Lanier

And of course, just now I tried to add Quest Diagnostics as a Quick Pay. They come up as a vendor for Quick Pay but the system bombs and won't set them up.

How is Mint everyone? Anyone here got experience with it?

Scott Brown

By far, the biggest issue I am having is the inconsistency of Quicken Bill Manager. I've used Quicken with BofA for 20+ years, without any troubles. Quicken Bill Manager tries to connect to your accounts at your various billers and get the bill - if it can't, you're screwed. The bill disappears from your calendar and won't show up until Quicken can connect to the biller.

I want it to be simple - I don't need QBM to connect to my billers, I get electronic notices, and keep track of my bills. I want/need it to behave more like my bank bill pay did. I need to set up my reminders, fetch my bills myself, and make a payment. If it has to connect to pay, fine - but that's all I need is a notice.

What I don;t need is to find out my mortgage didn't get paid, or discover I never saw the bill from cable TV because Quicken couldn't connect, and I can't pay it if it can't connect.

It may finally be time to move on from Quicken.

Chris_QPW

Scott Brown said:

By far, the biggest issue I am having is the inconsistency of Quicken Bill Manager. I've used Quicken with BofA for 20+ years, without any troubles. Quicken Bill Manager tries to connect to your accounts at your various billers and get the bill - if it can't, you're screwed. The bill disappears from your calendar and won't show up until Quicken can connect to the biller.

I want it to be simple - I don't need QBM to connect to my billers, I get electronic notices, and keep track of my bills. I want/need it to behave more like my bank bill pay did. I need to set up my reminders, fetch my bills myself, and make a payment. If it has to connect to pay, fine - but that's all I need is a notice.

What I don;t need is to find out my mortgage didn't get paid, or discover I never saw the bill from cable TV because Quicken couldn't connect, and I can't pay it if it can't connect.

It may finally be time to move on from Quicken.

I don't think it works that way.

There is a very good reason why they have to "get the bills".

When you are paying using your financial institution's bill payment system it is pushing that payment out from your checking account.  Quicken Bill Manager doesn't have access to that bill payment system.

What it is doing is logging into the biller's website and scheduling a payment.  This a "pull system". If it can't even get the bill information from that website correctly what are the chances of it scheduling a payment from that site?

I personally setup all my bills to be automatically paid from the biller's websites.  But there are two fundamental differences in what I'm doing and what Quicken Bill Manager is trying to do.  The first is that I'm a human that can adjust to changes in the biller's website, and not so true for a program running on the third-party bill pay service that Quicken Bill Manager uses.  The second part is that I'm set it up once, pay when due, and then I don't have to touch it again.  For Quicken Bill Manager you are asking it to access that website every payment cycle and do it all again.

JeremyGNJ

> @Chris_QPW said:
> I don't think it works that way.
>
> There is a very good reason why they have to "get the bills".
>

I think you mis understand the purpose of this post. I know there's REASONS why Quicken Bill Manager works this way. The point of the thread is to say:

"I used to be able to do _____ in quicken...and now I cannot"

It's not a technology complaint, it's a customer complaint. We have lost functionality that made Quicken valuable.

UKR

JeremyGNJ said:

...
"I used to be able to do _____ in quicken...and now I cannot"

It's not a technology complaint, it's a customer complaint. We have lost functionality that made Quicken valuable.

You really need to complain to the office of the banks' presidents for taking away our toy. It's for security reasons, to protect the bank computer systems from hackers, they say.

JeremyGNJ

> @UKR said:
> You really need to complain to the office of the banks' presidents for taking away our toy. It's for security reasons, to protect the bank computer systems from hackers, they say.

This is not true AT ALL. The banks may have taken it away, but quicken knew they were taking it away for a LONG TIME.

Not only did they not reach out to customers to discover how much effect this would have, or practively develop a new solution to fill the gap.....they didnt even NOTIFY their customers that bank-bill-pay was going away until about a month before.

Honestly, if Quicken just addressed this with something like "we recognize the loss of functionality and are investigating options to fill the gap"....I would be satisfied with that. But it is crickets.

Chris_QPW

I definitely agree that Quicken Inc could be more transparent.  It seems to be a company policy that they carried on from when Quicken was owned by Intuit not to disclose information unless they are forced to.  I guess it is the belief that they are going to get complaints either way, so they might as well not say anything.

As for the "fill the gap", that is exactly what Quicke Bill Manager is.  They can't create a system that the financial institutions don't support.  Without Direct Connect/OFX that is all they can support.

BTW there have been posts to that affect, just probably not as visible as they should be.

starunit

> @UKR said:
> You really need to complain to the office of the banks' presidents for taking away our toy. It's for security reasons, to protect the bank computer systems from hackers, they say.

Nah, the thing is that if the API is open to some companies (Intuit, etc?) then there is an API that Quicken could use. Instead, Quicken has decided to not use (or license) the USE of the API, preferring instead to channel the transactions through a third party.

Just a bunch of malarkey - charging the same or more for less product.

Chris_QPW

starunit said:

> @UKR said:
> You really need to complain to the office of the banks' presidents for taking away our toy. It's for security reasons, to protect the bank computer systems from hackers, they say.

Nah, the thing is that if the API is open to some companies (Intuit, etc?) then there is an API that Quicken could use. Instead, Quicken has decided to not use (or license) the USE of the API, preferring instead to channel the transactions through a third party.

Just a bunch of malarkey - charging the same or more for less product.

You really don't understand the business.

Quicken Inc is way too small of a company to maintain connection services with 15,000+ financial institutions, so they pay for that service.

What's more even if Quicken Inc was to employ the new API directly that would change nothing.
The new protocol which is called FDX doesn't have these features in it.  And I think that is on purpose.
I'm sure financial institutions aren't keen on having a third-party service tie into their bill payment system.  The ability to make transfer and send payments from a third-party program like Quicken in this day and age would most likely be considered a security risk.

And Quicken users are a small fraction of the customers of any given financial institution, they are probably very happy to see these features go away so that they don't have worry about them or pay for them for such a small fraction of their users.

DKJ

> @"Inman Lanier" said:
> How is Mint everyone? Anyone here got experience with it?

After searching for an alternative to Quicken I'm sorry not to have found anything better or even close to Quicken's functionality. You can Google "best alternatives to Quicken" to get a sense of what you may be able to use, and many products are free. For me, though, none really come close to the sophisticated functionality that Quicken has incorporated over the decades for tracking investments, spending, etc. If anyone else finds one, please post!

After several weeks of using Bank of America's bill payment system, I can report it is really quite easy and comprehensive.

Too bad that we've lost Quicken's Bill Pay system that was previously integrated with B of A's, but we have. No longer can I do everything from Quicken; but the solution is to open B of A's bill payment page along with opening Quicken, schedule the payment in B of A's site, record the payment in Quicken. After that, when the payment is sent, Quicken matches the transaction, and the Quicken account is in same position as before. Just a little double entry on my end, but nothing terribly onerous. And the Quicken transaction history, tracking, spending categorization, etc. is as it was.