Check pay is unreliable... long delays, non-payments, sent to wrong address

allmorro

Why can Check pay not work correctly? As noted in earlier post by others, a three week delay between the ostensible mail date, and arrival at the recipient is not atypical for Check pay. Yet, when I mail something personally, seldom does first class mail take more than 5 days, usually 2 days, to arrive. This inordinate delay in Check Pay has cost me significant late payment penalties, even though I now try to send checks the same day as I receive my Visa statement. It is even worse than this. I just had a check returned from the Commonwealth of Virginia since they could not identify what the payment was for. This is reasonable, since the address to which the check was supposed to be sent (as entered correctly in Quicken) was to an entity in Atlanta GA ! So not only can Check Pay not get the checks out on time (blaming the USPS), but apparently it cannot even get the address to which the check is to be sent correct (I suppose this also is a USPS problem ??.. not). In the older versions of Quicken, the bill pay feature worked wonderfully, I have used it for 20 years. Since Quicken became independent, their "new and improved" Quicken fails on may counts.. this being the most serious. It needs to be fixed.
(I use Quicken for MAC)

Chris_QPW

Some 25 years ago I used bill pay through Direct Connect/Wells Fargo and "trusted it" because in fact it was just sending commands to Wells Fargo's bill payment system so that if anything happened, I could always just go to the Wells Fargo website and fix it.  But when I left Wells Fargo a few years latter for nickeling and diming me for everything I went to automatic payments from the biller's sites, and that has worked wonderful ever since.

Even if there were zero reports of problems with Quicken Bill Manager (and there isn't by a long shot) I wouldn't trust it because of the simple fact that I wouldn't be able to talk to the people that are actually doing the service.

The setup is that Quicken (the program) talks through an API to a third-party service to perform these payments.  Quicken support is never going to have access to the their-party servers/logs, and as such you will always be talking to a "middleman". Certainly not ideal if anything goes wrong.

My credit score is too valuable to me to trust it to "it mostly works" kind of thinking that Quicken Inc seems to be comfortable with.