Wells Fargo - bill pay sent duplicate pay't

Jerry Pederson

Using Quicken I entered one instruction via "Direct Connect Bank Bill Pay" in payment of a credit card account that I have at a different financial institution.  Wells Fargo incorrectly issued a duplicate payment.

Has anybody experienced this?  If so, do you know why this has happened? 

UNEQUIVOCALLY, I only entered one instruction.

Boatnmaniac

I think I've only had that happen to me once (with another bank, not with WF).  If I remember it correctly, I had sent a bill pay command but during OSU Quicken crashed. 

My data file was corrupted and would not reopen so I needed to restore a backup file.  I then ran OSU and the scheduled bill payment did not download.  The bank I was using at the time, like with WF, does not show scheduled bill payments sent from Quicken in the online account so I could not check it to see if the bill pay command was successfully transmitted or not.  But I had assumed that it had not since Quicken had crashed during that OSU.

I then proceeded to send the bill pay command from the restored file and this time OSU completed properly.

A few days later 2 completed payments to the same biller downloaded.  Apparently, that 1st bill payment command did get transmitted before Quicken crashed along with the 2nd bill payment command from the restored file.  So, 2 payments were scheduled.

I can't think of any other way that something like this might happen.   Any chance that you had a situation similar to what I described?

Jerry Pederson

That sounds kind of like what happened to me.  Except I did not enter the instruction twice. I entered it only once.  I tried to have WF stop the second transaction.  The second transaction was credited to my credit card account.  The only problem is I have a rather large debit balance.  Fortunately this credit card is used for most of my purchases.

Quicken needs to look into this.

UKR

Does WF Direct Connect Bill Pay still work? I thought that there were problems due to some changes made with the connection method, rendering Q Bill Pay mostly unusable.

Personally, I don't use any of the Q Bill Pay or even Bank Bill Pay methods for paying my credit card bills. For decades I have always authorized the credit card company to automatically Direct Debit my checking account every month for the full credit card balance. This way my credit card bills were always paid on time. When traveling I wouldn't have to worry about missing a payment.
I recommend you set up the same direct debit process. Let the credit card company do all the work for you.

Jerry Pederson

Thanks for your advice.   WF is still on a "Direct Connect" system with Quicken.

Boatnmaniac

UKR said:

Does WF Direct Connect Bill Pay still work? I thought that there were problems due to some changes made with the connection method, rendering Q Bill Pay mostly unusable.

Personally, I don't use any of the Q Bill Pay or even Bank Bill Pay methods for paying my credit card bills. For decades I have always authorized the credit card company to automatically Direct Debit my checking account every month for the full credit card balance. This way my credit card bills were always paid on time. When traveling I wouldn't have to worry about missing a payment.
I recommend you set up the same direct debit process. Let the credit card company do all the work for you.

WF DC and DC Bill Pay do work and have for quite some time for me.  Maybe you are thinking of an issue from about a month ago where it stopped working for people who are running Win 7 and Win 8/8.1?  WF and many users kept blaming Quicken for the problem.  But since DC and DC Bill Pay were still working with other banks while running Win 7 and 8/8.1 most came to the conclusion that WF had made some system change that was not compatible with DC when running Win 7 & 8/8.1.  This conclusion was reinforced when quite a few of the users then upgraded to Win 10/11 and were then able to easily restore their DC connections with WF.

Jerry Pederson said:

That sounds kind of like what happened to me.  Except I did not enter the instruction twice. I entered it only once.  I tried to have WF stop the second transaction.  The second transaction was credited to my credit card account.  The only problem is I have a rather large debit balance.  Fortunately this credit card is used for most of my purchases.

Quicken needs to look into this.

By any chance do you have this bill payment set up as a recurring Bill Reminder with the box for Use Online Bill Pay checked (which will automatically enter Send into the Method/Check field)  and either Auto enter X days in advance set up or the box for Make this a repeating online payment checked? 

If so, I believe that this setup will cause the Bill Reminder with the Send bill pay command to be automatically entered into the Account Register without user intervention.  Once it is entered, it will then automatically be sent to the bank during OSU. 

If this is the case, because you restored that backup file, Quicken would not know that the 1st payment was previously sent and it would then be entirely possible (probable?) that Quicken entered and sent that 2nd bill payment command to WF.  Unless you were very diligent in reviewing the Account Register and/or the OSU Summary Report afterward, you might not even know that it happened.  At least, that seems like it would be a logical conclusion to me.  Thoughts?