Chase Credit Card Payment downloads

Kenr43

I have two Chase credit cards in Quicken and they always download transactions normally/correctly, but the scheduled payments don't get downloaded. I do have the Chase credit cards setup in 'bills & income' as an online bill. I would like to have the bills show up in my scheduled transactions list OR in the 'bills & income' area so that I can input this data as soon as the statement is received for a new month, but the payments don't get downloaded. Once a payment is actually made on the accounts, the data is downloaded, but this is totally late if one is trying to budget. Is this by design, or am I doing something wrong?

Quicken Kristina

Hello @Kenr43,

The simple answer is no, you are not doing anything wrong. When you have scheduled payments through the financial institution's bill pay, the only way that Quicken is able to download that information is if the financial institution allows Quicken to connect using Direct Connect and they also opt to make that bill pay information available to Quicken. Chase allows Quicken to connect via EWC+ only, which is why Quicken is unable to see and download those payments until they post.

Let me know how else I can help!

Chris_QPW

What you need to do for budgeting purposes is set up a scheduled reminder for the transfer between your checking account and the credit card account. And I will point out something, at best this is an estimate, and when the actual downloaded transaction comes in you need to change the amount of this reminder transaction and match it to the downloaded one. Note there are options like tracking the current balance in the reminder.

Note that if you send a fixed amount for the payment each month then t will automatically match. On the other hand, when a person is either paying the minimum or the full amount then the Direct Connect Payment doesn't add anything to this picture. Neither of these amounts are a fixed amount until at least the closing date and maybe longer. If you are paying the full amount, it might not be the closing amount. If you return items between when the statement closes and the payment, the payment will be less than the closing statement amount.

The only system that can come close to the right estimate is Bill presentment in Quicken. And note it has some pitfalls of its own. The idea here is that the bill presentment connection gets the latest bill and uses that bill amount and date when linked to a reminder. The pitfalls are that first off with some billers this doesn't work right, and you get a zero prediction in between bills. Another is just what I mentioned above. It will be using the closing statement balance, which might not be correct if you have had returns after the closing statement date.

And just to be clear of what Direct Connect/Payments can show. Say you scheduled a payment for 10 days from now. It would download this an put it in your register as a special kind of transaction with that future date. So, it would again work for fixed amounts paid in the future, but not for "pay in full on statement date" where the amount that is going to be paid isn't known.

Chris_QPW

Also note that Quicken Bill pay basically does what Direct Connect Bill Payment does, even though I don't really like it for two reasons. I have found the whole Bill Presentment/pay system buggy, and the other is I have my finances setup as automatic payments (pull instead of push payments) and as such don't need such a system.

But what Direct Connect Bill pay and Quicken Bill Pay try to solve is having to make entries in two places. You make a payment in one place (Quicken) and the other place (the financial institution) gets update with those same instructions.