Quicken Bill Manager is Deplorable!
I'm a long time Quicken user and the primary reason I signed up with Quicken Premier was to be able to see and pay my bills in one place without the delays experienced with my credit union's bill payer site. Quicken Bill payer solved all of these problems and worked very well until Quicken migrated all users to Bill Manager a few years ago.
Since then, I've experienced continuous bugs and problems, and this week was the final straw for me when the Quick Pay function stopped working with all of my online payees. Additionally, the connections for all of my online payees stopped working, and attempting to refresh them resulted in the same message - "Quicken is still connecting to your biller. You can refresh to check the status." I tried all of the typical customer support steps such as 'File/Validate and Repair File/'etc. Also, under the Bills and Income tab, I tried 'Settings/Review and Repair/Review and Repair Online Billers'. Yet again, after wasting hours with this nonsense I decided enough is enough, I removed all online bill reminders and replaced them with manual bill reminders. Until Quicken owns up to this and goes back to the Bill Pay model that actually worked, I'm using the old school method of manual reminders with links to the payee sites. I'm going to defer everyone to an earlier post from 2022, and point out that this was an issue then, and still is:
DKJ - Oct 2022
As I understand Quicken's explanation of this fiasco, there are two groups of users using some form of bill payment:
Group 1 used Quicken Bill Pay (not integrated with their bank) - I'm not in this group, so I can't be sure exactly how this worked, but it sounds like a third party partner of Quicken's handled this for Quicken, and two years ago that third party stopped the service. As a replacement, Quicken had developed their own "Quicken Bill Manager."
Group 2 used Quicken Bill pay integrated with their bank. Those of us in this group know how easy it was to set up an online bill payee and then simply enter in our Quicken register a date, payee, amount, and tell Quicken in the "Check #" column to "Send" the payment. All done. A few days later, Quicken would match the payment in the register with the data received from the bank during a One-Step Update or Account Update. Voila.
Recently Chase and B of A changed their connection method, and that method somehow doesn't "extend to Bill Pay," so for those of us in Group 2 lost that functionality we had "enjoyed for decades."
Quicken actually tried to do a solid for us in Group 2 by saying "Hey, we've got this thing called 'Bill Manager'...use it instead. Problem is that compared to the integrated Bill Pay system we have used for years, Bill Manager, not to put too fine a point on it, sucks.
Quicken says they have been working on this for several years. Really? If true, they really need someone new to take over that development effort.
Needed IMMEDIATELY:
1) Allow entering a payment for any date whether or not a bill is due. Come to think of it, what should it matter if there is even a bill that exists...just send the friggin' payment. I'm not asking Quicken to be sure I don't send money to someone who isn't expecting it.
2) Allow us simply to transfer our existing Online Payee list to new Check Pay or Quick Pay payees. Really, not having this functionality from the beginning is simply laziness on Quicken's development team's part. Make us type in 20+ payee's addresses and account numbers again? C'mon. If there is more data you need us to fill in, or if you need somehow to confirm it with payee as we enter it, then ask only for the new data and confirm it. But to force us to re-enter what we've already done when you have that data in the application, wow.
Needed ASAP:
1)Check Pay vs. Quick Pay - who cares? I don't care if you mail a check or send it electronically...if one takes up to 5 days, and one takes 1 day, just tell me. We already know that some vendors don't get payment as fast as others.
2)The other functionality as mentioned by OP and others who have spent a LOT of time trying to make Bill Manager do what they need.
For me, for now:
I've switched over to using B of A's bill payment system from the B of A site. It's a little kludgy, but I guess I'll get used to it quickly enough. And I'll continue to use Quicken for downloading from my B of A checking account, and match or complete the register transactions as they come in during the updates.
The fact is that Quicken has never failed to annoy over the years, but I haven't found anything better when it comes to consolidating all of my financial accounts, historical prices, transaction history, etc.
I just hope the new private equity buyer will bring some discipline to the development team so they can start to get ahead of the curve instead of constantly rolling out half-baked product fixes and 'upgrades' that really annoy users.
Comments
-
I am in Group 2 that @DKJ alludes to. I was disappointed when Chase switched to EWC+ and I lost the ability to schedule payments with Quicken. I have no experience with either Bill Pay or Bill Manager, but I have a number of online billers linked to reminders. When that feature works I find it useful to get the notification that a bill is due including the amount and due date. Also a few of my utilities provide a pdf of the actual bill that I can view easily in Quicken. Having said this, there are a number of billers that I simply cannot add to Quicken. The latest that I tried was Verizon. I knew this was hopeless but I wanted to test it out. Verizon forces a certain kind of 2fa that requires me to grant permission for a login by sending me a text with a link to a Verizon web page. I don't think I even got the text message when Quicken was trying to set up the biller. I really don't understand how any third party solution to paying bills is going to work given that 2fa is ubiquitous. One of my utilities lets me authorize Quicken's vendor to access my acount for a 90 day period which is not too bad. In any case I don't really need the extra reminder in Quicken. I have autopay setup with either my bank or my utilities which send email reminders. I probably should delete my online billers in Quicken and feel good that I am trusting Quicken with fewer login credentials.
0