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Bill pay for Mac extremely unstable?

BP1T

I have used Quicken for Mac bill pay for more than a year and find it to be extremely unstable. I was able to see my Fidelity Rewards VISA bill and pay it from the register for months. Now, Quicken can't log in. Other bills take weeks to show up in Quicken, although the biller informs that my current bill is ready to view. I can pay some utilities but for others, Quicken tells me the biller doesn't recognize my checking account. It all feels very held together with string and baling wire. Am I the only one?

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Chris_QPW

It all feels very held together with string and baling wire. Am I the only one?

No, you aren't the only one. I would say that anyone that thinks otherwise it extremely lucky to have just the right billers that work right, or very naive/persistent/optimistic that it will somehow work "in the future".

You call it "string and baling wire" I call it one big hack job.

From what I gather there isn't any standard way to get the billing information, and the same with the way they are submitting payments.

The third-party service they are paying for this is trying to log in as you to your biller's website and do this. There might be some rare cases where they have been provided some API or sort to do this, but I would have to say that I think most biller's don't provide any kind of API and as such they are trying "screen scrape" the biller's website to do this in most cases.

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7916268/my-explanation-of-the-different-term-services-that-quicken-has-provides-and-provided-in-the-past

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UKR

Please consider this alternative to using Bill Manager. Many banks and billers, in an attempt to better secure their computer systems from hackers, are no longer willing to support third-party data aggregators like Quicken, Intuit, etc.

BP1T

Thanks UKR. So it sounds like this is a feature that Quicken really should not be advertising.

Chris_QPW

It all feels very held together with string and baling wire. Am I the only one?

You call it "string and baling wire" I call it one big hack job.

From what I gather there isn't any standard way to get the billing information, and the same with the way they are submitting payments.

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7916268/my-explanation-of-the-different-term-services-that-quicken-has-provides-and-provided-in-the-past

UKR

Oh, it was a good feature … while it lasted.

And then there was a new Federal Rule which instructed banks to do more to protect their computer systems from worldwide hackers. Now banks are closing their doors, so to speak, to third party data aggregators and making it more complicated for the individual customers to access bank computer systems.

Now it's better to let the banks' or billers' computer systems do the work for you, automatically every month on due date and keep Quicken Bill Pay / Check Pay out of the picture as much as possible. (And that's IMHO)

Chris_QPW

Oh, it was a good feature … while it lasted.

It was never a good feature.

The "Online Bill Presentment" came out in Quicken 2015 Windows, and from day one it was hit and miss. I tried using it for years. And then when Metavante decided to get out of the bill payment services and Quicken Inc scrambled to get a bill payment system they went with that same broken system, except extending to now trying to push through bill payments.

That is like trying to balance a ball on top of another ball on a slanted surface. Noting about it is "stable".

And in my opinion "data aggregators" are the result of a government that makes "suggestions" but doesn't insist that there are any good standards for anything.

Other than "knowing how to contact" the financial institutions (which BTW was in the original OFX standard, but not adopted by the financial institutions/Intuit) a protocol like OFX means there isn't any need for a "data aggregator" in between the program like Quicken and the financial institution.

It is this lack of proper protocols that lead to the need for "aggregation", which is a fancy name for "hacking websites", which is certainly something that should never really have been allowed, and the fact that they got away with it for so long was just the naive concepts of security back then. Who in their right mind would think that "Logging in as the user, using a 'script" on a server" is the right way to do things. That sounds like to me the same as "a hacker trying to get access to user's accounts using a 'script' on a server.