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Scheduled payments for Bank of America are no longer downloading

Jeffrey Newman

Previously when Quicken forced a change to Quicken Connect I could change the connection back to Direct Connect and resolved the issue. However, now when I try to change it back it reverts to Quicken Connect. Help please!!

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Quicken Anja

Hello @Jeffrey Newman,

Thank you for reaching out to the Community, though I apologize for any confusion.

With the new EWC+ connection method (which will show as "Quicken Connect" in Quicken for Mac), scheduled bill pay transactions will no longer download as they did before as this was a Direct Connect feature. The new connection method only downloads posted transactions.

Please note that Direct Connect with Bank of America is set to be discontinued. If you have already made the switch over, that is likely why you are unable to switch back to Direct Connect.

We apologize for any inconvenience! Thank you.

Jeffrey Newman

UGH!! So we've permanently lost insight into scheduled transactions? That's a big loss.

Tortuga1974

I've been using Quicken for about 15 years. That's a huge loss for sure. Any chance that this will become available in the future? I don't mind scheduling my payments on the BofA website, but if they aren't automatically transferred to my quicken register when I connect to the bank, then I can't use it to budget properly. I suppose I could enter it manually, but it would defeat the purpose of using the software to save time. I'm also unable to edit existing future scheduled payments that were setup before the change. I've had to adjust some payments so I now have 2 different registers that do not match. Any insight and proposed work-arounds will be appreciated.

Ps56k2

The recent migrations of - Schwab, Chase, BoA, and others - have eliminated those special features of Direct Connect.
This migration is being driven by the financial institutions.... not Quicken.
In the QWin world, the new protocol is called: EWC+

Chris_QPW

This information might be of some help:
https://www.quicken.com/support/managing-bank-bill-pay-and-transfers-after-direct-connect-discontinuation

jimmeep

yes, not having the scheduled transactions display in Quicken is very sad indeed. Doesn't matter whose fault it is, I will have to rethink going forward with the program.

Niels S

If this feature is not returned, I will be forced to stop using quicken - having insight into future transactions to plan future cash flow is critical to my use of quicken. I have been a quicken user since quicken for DOS going back to the 1990s.

Ps56k2

Just need to go back to double entry …
1 - enter Quicken Reminder for upcoming payment
2 - physically enter the future payment via online bank website bill payment feature

jacobs

@Niels S Quicken still supports Direct Connect, but it's highly unlikely BoA will reverse course and re-enable Direct Connect. But here's the thing: for your recurring transactions, you only have to enter each one in Quicken once as a scheduled transaction. How many do you have? 10? 15? 20? Once you spend a little time to set up your recurring transactions, there's no ongoing extra work. To me, it's not enough of an issue to abandon Quicken over this.

jobworker

@jacobs. I couldn't agree more. A little work up front to correct the situation.

Niels S

@jacobs - does this work for recurring transactions that vary in amount each month - e.g., a credit card bill? I.e., would I then only enter once? Also, it does not sound like this solves for non-recurring ad-hoc bills? Can you point me to any guidance here? My view is that the major financial institutions and quicken need to work together to keep the forward looking scheduled transaction data flowing in to quicken. Without this, quicken becomes a dumb register.

Niels S

It looks like I may need to revert to Quicken Bill Pay (at a fee) instead of using my BofA bill pay capabilities (that were free) to achieve the same experience I had before. Have others drawn the same conclusion?

Chris_QPW

Niels S said:

It looks like I may need to revert to Quicken Bill Pay (at a fee) instead of using my BofA bill pay capabilities (that were free) to achieve the same experience I had before. Have others drawn the same conclusion?

I would warn you that Quicken Bill Manager isn't what you had before with Bank of America's bill pay through Direct Connect, it works quite differently and isn't nearly as reliable.

jacobs

Niels S said:

@jacobs - does this work for recurring transactions that vary in amount each month - e.g., a credit card bill? I.e., would I then only enter once?

Yes and no. You'd make one entry in Quicken for the recurring transaction, but it won't automatically pick up the payment amount. You'd have to either edit the amount each month manually, or drag the transaction over the one which downloads from the bank.

Niels S said:

Also, it does not sound like this solves for non-recurring ad-hoc bills? Can you point me to any guidance here?

You can enter the transaction manually in Quicken and let it match the downloaded transaction, if you want to see it in Quicken right away. Or you can pay with bill via BoA and wait for it to download to Quicken when it's paid.

Niels S said:

My view is that the major financial institutions and quicken need to work together to keep the forward looking scheduled transaction data flowing in to quicken.

It's fine that that's the way you want it to work, but that's not the way the world is going. The financial institutions of the world have little incentive to build, maintain and support solutions specific to the small percentage of their customers who use Quicken. They are taking the path of least resistance (and cost) by letting the few major players in the aggregation market serve as the interface to Quicken and dozens of other personal finance programs and websites.

Niels S said:

Without this, quicken becomes a dumb register.

It depends on how you use Quicken and what your expectations are. Your transactions will still flow into Quicken, but you have to do some additional steps. In the past, if you entered a bill to pay via Quicken, you'd see that future-dated payment a week or two or three before it was paid; if you take that away, does it make Quicken worthless to you? That is, if you schedule a payment via BoA and don't see the payment in your Quicken register until it is paid and downloads into Quicken, does not seeing the upcoming payment for the week or two before make Quicken worthless? If so, are you willing to enter your payment transactions in Quicken in addition to BoA?

For me, the real value of Quicken is having all my financial information, current and historical, in one database. I actually manually enter most of my transactions, because I find it doesn't take me much longer than downloading and then editing/adding memos/adding splits — and it avoids any recurring issues with Quicken connectivity. I'm not saying that's the right solution for you or most people, just that there are different ways we all use Quicken and determine if there's value in it for us.

Niels S

@Jacobs - really appreciate your detailed thoughts and comments. For me, the double entry to get future transactions in ahead of the payment taking place and downloading opens up the possibility of errors. A single entry into BofA billowy that then downloads with the future date eliminates the potential for errors.

In one of your comments, you mention "aggregators" - is there an aggregator that I could use that would help me solve for my issue?

Chris_QPW

Niels S said:

In one of your comments, you mention "aggregators" - is there an aggregator that I could use that would help me solve for my issue?

Intuit is Quicken Inc's aggregator, and that is the only one you can use with Quicken. Other aggregators that you might not be aware of would be the one that your financial institution probably uses. If you have ever seen where your financial institution will allow you to connect to another financial institution to show their account balances and maybe even the transactions, well that is done with an aggregator.

But none of the aggregators I have seen provide for bill payments.

Chris_QPW

Let me add this since you might not know. This is the flow of data for Quicken Connect:

Quicken Mac -> Quicken servers/Quicken cloud dataset -> Intuit servers -> Financial institution's servers.

Jeffrey Levin

Just adding my voice to the chorus of people who lament the loss of this service. It helped a great deal with budgeting and forecasting. Yes, I can manually enter future payments. But I will miss the convenience of the automatic downloads a lot.

What I've not been able to find an explanation for is why the banks are moving in this direction. I'm sure they don't make tech decisions with 3rd party software in mind. How does whatever changes led to the loss of this service help the banks themselves?

Greg_the_Geek

Read this post about the different types of connections to banks.

My explanation of the security of the different connection types. — Quicken

qcknuser

I find EWC+ so frustrating re budgeting and future planning but it's here so what is the best way to adapt? Bill reminder? Reoccuring transactions? I've never used either. If I pay the fee to use quicken bill pay, will that register for a futruer payment? Any other useful method so I wont be surprised when that payment comes due?