Please give us your feedback: Increased Quick Pay Reliability
Quicken Bill Manager’s Quick Pay is a fast and easy way to make payments to any of the 11,000 billers you connect to online. It connects to your biller’s website and makes instant payment requests on your behalf. You don't have to worry about sending the payment in advance or getting late fees when you miss a due date.
However, we recognize that while the service is quick, it can be unreliable at times. The service is sensitive to biller website outages and additional security requirements like multi-factor authentication, which can lead to payment failures and the inconvenience of having to resubmit payments.
Starting next week, we will launch a significant enhancement, aimed at increasing the reliability of your Quick Pay payments! Quick Pay now supports payments over the Automated Clearing House (ACH) network, the very same network used by banks that offer a bill payment service.
If you'd like to see more information on this, check out the FAQ here.
Our product team would love to hear your feedback on this new ACH payment capability. If you have used this feature, please add your experience below!
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Why can't I pay all my bills by ACH instead of the biller's web site? Years ago, Quicken did that but then changed to "check pay" instead.
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@fkheath ,
If your bank (the one that runs your checking account) recently required you to reauthorize your checking account and/or your bank has changed from "Direct Connect" to either "Express Web Connect" or "Express Web Connect+" you can no longer use Online Bill Pay direct to the bank or Quicken Bill Manager's Quick Pay function. The bank no longer supports this function through Quicken.
IMHO, you have these alternatives (in no particular order of preference):
- Use Quicken Bill Manager's Check Pay making sure to submit payment early enough (at least 3 weeks before due date) to allow time for delivery and processing. Note: limited number of free transactions per month.
- Logon to the bank's website and schedule your bill pay payments to be executed by the bank from your checking account (*). In parallel to that, in Quicken use a regular Scheduled Reminder to record your payment. Repeat both actions every time another payment is due.
- Bypass Bill Manager. Let the biller's (or credit card company's) computer system do all the work for you. Logon to the biller's website once and set up their Autopay, APS, Direct debit, etc. service to make the current payment and all future payments on Due Date directly from your checking account. (**) In parallel to that, in Quicken, every month, record a regular Scheduled Reminder to keep track of your payments before they come due.
- Write (or print with Quicken) a paper check and mail it to the biller, making sure to mail payment early enough (at least 10 days before due date) to allow time for delivery and processing.
I've been using method #3 for decades, since before the Internet and transaction download capabilities were even introduced. It's easy to get used to this process. And I have yet to miss a single payment.
(*) This would be equivalent to "using ACH" because your bank sends an electronic deposit transaction from your checking account to the biller's bank account.
(**) This process also uses ACH to send an electronic debit from the biller's bank to your checking account
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Provided that you are actually talking about Quicken Bill Manager and comparing it to what was available in the past, and questioning why ACH is the "fallback" and not the primary method, here is my take on it.
The main reason is because of the simple fact that if one has a given system up and working in a certain way, they aren't about to dump it for a complete change over to a new system. A "failover" is easier to program, and it is less likely to be as disruptive to the users where their service is already working.
Note in this thread I went into what the bill payment systems are/were. You can see by it that besides the one provided by Direct Connect there was a system that was using ACH, but they have gotten out the business. And I will point out that there is one very important difference between that system and the one provided by Quicken Bill Manager, and that is bill presentment. The old system knew nothing about the actual bill. The Quicken Bill Manager system starts from going to the biller's website to get that information. And while there, they have the "possibility" of scheduling a payment.
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Problem is that "bill presentment" rarely works. This month, February, one out of a dozen bills actually populated the Online Bills and Income tab, and was .01 short at that. Maybe 10 showed the bill (one more .01 short) in REMINDERS without populating Online Bills. Seems the rare case that an Online Bill with a linked reminder works as expected. Especially if the biller is EWC +. Will only show (for me) under reminders in manage reminders.
Then, there are still a handful of billers that destroy the connection to EWC+ billers when added (Biller no longer valid - please delete and readd). Best example this month is Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts. Though in the past (not currently) Hulu, American Express and AT&T have done this.So "bill presentment" is, in my opinion, at least one of the most broken features of Quicken.
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Sorry, but I Agree with above. Bill Presentment for online bills has constant problems of not updating so I don't see how bill pay can ever be trusted…
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I second that.
Barry Graham
Quicken H&B Subscription0 -
Bill Presentment was introduced in Quicken 2015. For years I tried to get it to work and as @Bob. said it just isn't reliable. I never went for Quicken Bill Manager for two main reasons. The first being that I already have a system I have been using for over 30 years, and that is to setup automatic bill payments for the balance at the biller's website. I have had zero problems with this system, and it is all automatic. I have no desire to babysit payments for all the billers every month. The second of course is why would I trust my credit score to a system that is based on a "hack". Just like there isn't a standardized system for downloading transactions and so you have the hack of Express Web Connect/aggregators, the same is true for bills. "Hacking" into a biller's website with a server acting as the user (like no real hacker would use a computer to do the same thing!) to view/schedule payments, is just asking for trouble in my opinion.
Side notes of the bills that were presented reliably. My credit card account, but then the reminder ends up being wrong because of a return, which will be a transaction included in the statement balance that the bill presentment gets, but not in the final bill, and as such I end up having to correct the exact amount anyways. So, what good is it if it isn't totally automatic? And then there are ones that I could benefit from like my water bill, and you guess it, it would never download even though it said it was setup.
I get systems like Express Web Connect and this billing system. People are screaming for that service. Our government will not mandate a system for providing it, so they do what they can. And that means that the main discussion on a forum like this is always going to be a broken download/missing payment …
The ironic part is that between experience, avoiding certain things, and just luck, I think I have a much better experience than the average person.
This is one of those things where I wonder how the average person deals with such things.
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@Chris_QPW said: The ironic part is that between experience, avoiding certain things, and just luck, I think I have a much better experience than the average person.
I do things somewhat differently than you, Chris, but I also avoid the parts of Quicken which are prone to ongoing connectivity problems, and I have a pretty flawless experience with Quicken. But most people wouldn't want to do what I do: enter transactions manually.
I've used Quicken for three decades, and in the beginning there was no Internet or downloading of transactions, so I was simply used to manual data entry. At one point, I decided to test downloading my transactions. Even when it worked correctly, I found I spent a fair amount of time editing transactions to be the way I wanted: cleaning up Payee names, applying my own categories, adding memos to many transactions, and creating splits for many transactions. I timed myself doing it both ways over a few months and found it only took me slightly longer to enter everything manually — but getting it right in one pass — than downloading and editing/tweaking. So I decided to keep entering things manually as I've always done, and it works for me. It won't work for a lot of people; it really depends on how many accounts, transactions, investments, etc. you have; the higher the volume, the less practical it becomes to enter things manually. So I never suggest this as an ideal solution for fellow Quicken users, but for me, it works.
As for bill payments, I have some monthly bills set up to auto-pay from my credit card when there's not a fee for that, or my bank account. For my credit card accounts, I generally log on each month to download a statement so I can reconcile with Quicken; it takes 10 more seconds while logged in to tell the site to process a payment if I haven't set it up to auto-pay.
As a result, I never deal with all the pain points many Quicken users wrestle with, like transactions which don't download, accounts which stop connecting, bills which don't get paid on time or correctly, old transactions which get deleted or changed, reconciliations which don't work, etc.
Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 19930 -
Some people are blessed with the ability to pay bills without having to check they have the funds in the bank. For some of us, we do need to check and that is why it was important to be able to download bills in advance from my bank, which was possible until they took away Direct Connect, and that is why Bill Payment is a nice feature when it works properly.
Barry Graham
Quicken H&B Subscription0 -
@BarryGraham the key is "when it works properly". Bill presentment was first introduced in Quicken Windows 2015, it isn't a new feature. I tried for years to get it to work properly, but never could count on it. I'm not surprised by this. There is no standard on how to get those bills so it mostly works by trying to log in as you into the bill's websites and get the bill. That let alone trying to schedule a bill is going to very error prone, and it is.
As of paying without checking the bank account balance, yes, I can do that these days, but it wasn't always the case. I think it has been more than 35 years since I could use Direct Connect to pay my bills.
So, how did I do it? Reminders in Quicken, emails from the bills to update those reminders for the next bill, or back in the day paper statements. And using the projected balances to make sure I have enough in the checking account. But I want to point out that one of the major things about setting up an automatic payment for the bill at the biller's site is that most of them allow me to pay with my credit card, which in turn get paid automatically from my checking account. The reason this is important is because that means almost all my bills/cash flow go through that credit card. The credit card statement comes in, I now have more than 20 days before it actually has to be paid. Plenty of time to transfer money to the checking account to cover it. About the only bills I pay directly/automatically from my checking account are utilities and HOA fees, because they can only be paid automatically from a checking account.
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I would like to point out one more thing, Bill Presentment doesn't do anything that you can pretty easily do for yourself. Basically, it checks to see if there is a bill statement, and if there is, it gets the amount and date, and sets the linked reminder to that amount/date.
You can do the exact same thing with setting up you bills to send you an email (or they will send a paper statement), when the comes in up update the reminder if needed. No bill comes in just before you have to pay it. You always have time to update a reminder, check the projected balances and transfer money to your checking account as needed.
As for paying bills, like I said I like paying them automatically by having already setup an automatic payment, but if that isn't your thing, you can always use your financial institution's billing system.
Yes, if all of this would work properly it would be a bit easier, but I believe in living it the real world, not some fantasy world of how I would like the world to be.
And the truth is that Direct Connect is going away (and was never available to everyone in the first place), and the old third-party biller system that used ACH to transfer from your checking account to the biller is no longer available.
Just as there will never be a fix for downloading transactions as long as our government doesn't mandate a standard. There will not be a billing system that works from Quicken that will be reliable.
I don't know about you, but my credit score and such is far more important to me than to trust it to an unreliable system. I much prefer having to enter things twice, once at the financial institution for the actual bill payment and once in Quicken over trusting a system that can't be trusted 100%. And like I said, when setup so that the major amount of the bills goes through a credit card, I have reduced the bills that I have to attend to individually.
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@Chris_QPW I can also do all these things outside of Quicken with reminders and bills, and now that's what I do. My point is that I would like to still be able to do them from within Quicken. Bill Presentment was never a reliable way to do this but downloading bill payments 30 days in advance from Bank of America (which covered my American Express Bills and mortgage payment) worked flawlessly for years until they took away Direct Connect. If Bill presentment worked properly then it would basically achieve the same end result which is to allow entering of the upcoming payments a couple of weeks in advance, without having to key in the amounts manually.
Barry Graham
Quicken H&B Subscription0 -
@BarryGraham well you can "want" all you like, but as I see it no one can bring about what you want.
It simply isn't in Quicken Inc's power to change these things.
For some reason people believe that Quicken Inc is some driving force. They aren't, and neither is "Quicken". They are a tiny company, and Quicken's users are a tiny fraction of any given financial institution's customers.
There is in fact no one entity that controls this. Even at its height Direct Connect was used by about 4,500 financial institutions out of more than 35,000+ in the US alone. And of that very small fraction supported Bill Pay through it.
If Intuit, Microsoft and CheckFree and "the financial institution" whatever that meant, couldn't make any more impact on getting a standard in place, what do you think the chances of any of this including Express Web Connect +/FDX has? And note that looking at the FDX protocol that the big financial institutions (not Quicken Inc, they are mostly "endorsing it because they have to, or need to believe that their world isn't going away") they don't agree with you. They have purposely not put a billing system in it. From their perspective that makes perfect sense. Financial institutions might want to get at other financial institution's customers data to display it and such, but they don't want other financial institutions or external programs like Quicken to be controlling their system in an era of so much hacking.
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Financial institutions might want to get at other financial institution's customers data to display it and such, but they don't want other financial institutions or external programs like Quicken to be controlling their system in an era of so much hacking.
…And every time you log into one of your financial institutions' websites, it's an opportunity for them to market their products and services to you. It's free advertising to an already-interested client base. So they don't want you bypassing trips to their websites via some third-party application; they want you to log in so they can sell to you.
Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 19930 -
I'm always felt from the financial institution's viewpoint supporting a program like Quicken is not in their best interest. And I think you will definitely see that more and more as time goes on. Not only can they advertise to you when you go to their website, think about what happens when you leave a financial institution. All of that history is gone. Having a program like Quicken allows the users to switch financial institutions easily and use multiple financial institution easily. This great for the user, but not the financial institution that wants you to stay with them. I think way back before the financial institutions had built out their websites and such, they saw it as a bonus, but I bet more and more they see it as a pain in the side, just like Intuit did. They have spent all this effort to build up their systems, and most of their customers are using those systems.
Here I'm taking a statement from @BarryGraham himself:
I can also do all these things outside of Quicken with reminders and bills, and now that's what I do.
And that in a nutshell tells you what the 99.99% people are doing, they don't use Quicken they use what the financial institutions provide.
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I meant that I can remind myself to pay bills outside of Quicken. Everything else I do in Quicken I rely on it for, such as entering data that enables me to do my tax return in a few hours even though I have more than a hundred charitable transactions a year, and I can track bank and credit card transactions without having to enter them manually. I never meant to imply that Quicken isn't useful or that it's dispensable for me.
Barry Graham
Quicken H&B Subscription0 -
I submitted the bug report BUT again today:
BofA Credit card bill showed up as new bill today for Apr 4 for $14,000 which is the amount that was due and paid in March. Current Bill that BofA shows is due Apr 5 and amount is $4000. (If I used this to pay bills I would have major problems)
PS: Last month it showed $7000 and I owed $14000. I just don't see how anyone can depend on this to pay bills if the bill amounts aren't correct to begin with.
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Quesgtions:
1 Do yu have Bof A as Direct Connect, EWC or EWC+?
2. Do you also have reminders for your BofA bills?
3. If yes to reminders, do they show they exact same amounts as online bills?
Thx.
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And this why putting a bandage, after a failure, on this system just basically doesn't make any sense.
I never saw where I was getting a "past statement amount" like @miklk is getting, but I got many zero balances "in between statements" which really messes up the projected balances and Quicken took away the estimating when linked to an online bill.
Personally, I think the whole "bill presentment" idea is failure and should have never been used as the basis of a bill payment system.
If they can't even navigate the biller's systems to get just an amount and a date correctly, how do they expect to submit a bill payment, which has to be more complicated? And then as a backup, say "well if I couldn't submit the payment through the website, and ACH is setup, use it instead." This backwards, and it is backwards only because they are "patching their existing system". No one that was starting out fresh would have done it this way. They would have put the ACH transfer first, and only if that wasn't possible, go to the "hacking system" which is what the current bill payment system is, a hack.
But more to the point, if you look at how both Direct Connect, and the old Quicken Bill pay worked they never had "bill presentment", and they never went to the biller's website.
I wonder if there are any other better bill payment systems out there, ones that work more like the old Quicken Bill pay system, that just do a ACH transfer if possible, and if not send a check.
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For me, reliability is the most important feature of any bill payment system. Because of this, I try to minimize the number of steps in the process, including handling by US Mail, myself, and any third parties.
When Bank of America stopped supporting Direct Connect for bill payment, I changed as many bills as possible so that the biller takes the money directly from my checking account or a credit card. I have manual Reminders (not linked to online bills) set up in Quicken for all of my regular bills. I receive email notifications from the billers when the bill is issued. That way all I need to do is review the bills, enter the correct amount into the Reminder, and accept it. When the payment transaction downloads from the bank, it matches the entry that is already in the register in Quicken, confirming that the bill has been paid. Even if I am travelling or my computer dies and all my backups are lost, the bills still get paid.
For a few bills, mostly medical bills and very small billers, I go the the bank's website when I receive the bill to initiate the payment there, and separately enter it in Quicken. The bank pays by ACH if possible, and if not they mail a check.
BoA also offers a bill presentment and auto-pay option for large billers, which I use to pay credit card bills. I get to choose whether to pay the minimum due, the full amount, or some other amount. I get emails from the biller and the bank when the bill is issued, and I can view the bill and compare it to the proposed payment amount and the balance in Quicken. That has been extremely reliable.
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BofA is now EWC+ Manual reminder and Bill Presentment show the same wrong info because I have online bill linked to the reminder to supposedly show the correct info when the reminder comes due.
Seems like almost monthly, I need to delete the online bill and re-add it to get them to update when they stop updating often.
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@Jim_Harman said:
BoA also offers a bill presentment and auto-pay option for large billers, which I use to pay credit card bills. I get to choose whether to pay the minimum due, the full amount, or some other amount. I get emails from the biller and the bank when the bill is issued, and I can view the bill and compare it to the proposed payment amount and the balance in Quicken. That has been extremely reliable.
Even though I haven't used it extensively I have used such a system at some of my financial institutions and found it to be very reliable, and I think I can tell you why.
My statements above are maybe a bit misleading. Just like Direct Connect and Express Web Connect. There is a system for getting bills. As in that is standardized and reliable. And most likely the third-party system is using started with that and is used for some billers. But just like Direct Connect was only partially adopted by the financial institution, and as such the hacking like Express Web Connect and "aggregators" began. The same seems to be for this third-party bill presentment/payment system. Instead of telling their customers sorry your biller isn't supported, or sending out more checks, they went to the hacking of websites.
This was a poor choice 20 years ago, but in these days of security concerns logging in as the user to anywhere is just a terrible idea.
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