Setting up a scheduled monthly bill pay (Q Mac)

DougHoegh
DougHoegh Quicken Mac Subscription Member ✭✭

Something changed and I'm not sure what I did. I'm trying to set up a bill pay between a checking account and a credit card account. I thought before I could do it as a transfer to the existing credit card account, but now the only thing showing up is my investment accounts (listed individually and a generic called credit card. How do I add or expose my other banking and credit card accounts with this bill pay function? What did I turn off because I have existing credit card accounts where this was once setup. Thanks

Answers

  • jacobs
    jacobs Quicken Mac Subscription SuperUser, Mac Beta Beta

    To clarify, are you trying to have Quicken initiate an actual bill payment as a transfer between your accounts — e.g. to direct your checking account to "pay" money to your investment account — or just to accurately record the transfer of funds from one account to the other in Quicken?

    a generic [account] called credit card

    When you click on this item in the left sidebar, is the register on the right side all your actual credit card transactions. That is, is the only problem the name of the account in the left sidebar? If so, Control-Click on the name in the left sidebar, and select Rename from the pop-up menu. You can name the account whatever works best for you, like "Hilton Amex" or "Chase Visa" or "Citi Mastercard-1234"…

    Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 1993
  • DougHoegh
    DougHoegh Quicken Mac Subscription Member ✭✭
    edited January 16

    Only trying to initiate the transfer not pay the bill. This is what I'm trying to do. Create a monthly reminder. I went to the Bill and Income tab. Selected +New Bill. Add a manual bill. Payee is Apple Card. (Which is the name for my Apple Credit Card listed under my credit cards.) Then I tried under category to find Apple Card the name of my credit card account, under transfer, but it's not shown along with any of my other credit card accounts. I only see my investment accounts listed by name, and a generic account called Credit Card Payment. I look at my other listed Bills under Bill and Income and they show setup to transfer to which ever credit card account by name so I must have done it before.

  • jacobs
    jacobs Quicken Mac Subscription SuperUser, Mac Beta Beta

    Okay, got it; thanks for the additional information.

    The first thing I'd check is to see if your Apple Card account is set up as a credit card in Quicken. Click on the account in the left sidebar and select Settings to see if it is Type=Credit Card or something else. I don't understand why your other credit card accounts are available for a transfer and this one is not. But even that doesn't explain it…

    I don't use the Bills & Income page much, as I prefer to work in account registers, so for the purpose of testing this, click open your Apple Card account in the sidebar, and in the register, create a new transaction. In the Category field, type "Transfer" and you should see the generic "Transfer" at the top followed by transfers to each of your other accounts. Is "Transfer:[Apple Card]" available as a choice here?

    (Don't use the generic "Transfer" or "Transfer:Credit Card Payment". These should only be used if you are moving money to some account which you do not have in your Quicken file at all. They tell Quicken to remove money from the current account without moving it elsewhere or counting it as an expense.)

    Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 1993
  • DougHoegh
    DougHoegh Quicken Mac Subscription Member ✭✭

    Apple Card is set as a credit card. I can manually create the transfer either from my Bank or from the credit card accounts any time I want. The transfer option is there and all my various banks, credit cards, and investment accounts are there. And I swore they were all there before if I tried to create a reminder in Bill Pay. It's only now that the only accounts that show are my investment accounts and no others. I wonder if it happened when I did the upgrade last week to 8.0?

  • Jon
    Jon Quicken Mac Subscription SuperUser, Mac Beta Beta
    edited January 16

    I'm seeing the same thing, and it's not just Apple Card - when I try to set up a new manual e-bill payment, the subcategories shown under Transfer do not include any of my Banking accounts. Credit cards, savings, cash - they're all missing.

  • DougHoegh
    DougHoegh Quicken Mac Subscription Member ✭✭

    Jon I'm the same way. If I do a transaction in any register all the transferable accounts are there. It's only in trying to set up a new bill pay that I only see my investments accounts. No banks, savings, credit card, nada. I'm thinking it's a bug in 8.0.

  • Jon
    Jon Quicken Mac Subscription SuperUser, Mac Beta Beta
    edited January 16

    It does seem to be a bug starting with 8.0.0 - when I went back to try 7.10.1 the Banking accounts showed up as an option for a new manual bill. But with 8.0.0 they do not.

  • DougHoegh
    DougHoegh Quicken Mac Subscription Member ✭✭

    Do you have an inside track to report it and It will be addressed ASAP. I'm a newbie on the MAC side.

  • Jon
    Jon Quicken Mac Subscription SuperUser, Mac Beta Beta

    I already reported it through the Report A Problem option on the Help menu, I suggest you do the same. I don't have any particular "inside track" for reporting problems in the released program - if it was still in beta I would probably get more attention as a beta tester.

  • DougHoegh
    DougHoegh Quicken Mac Subscription Member ✭✭

    Reporting it now through chat.

  • jacobs
    jacobs Quicken Mac Subscription SuperUser, Mac Beta Beta

    I now see what you both are seeing with creating a new e-Bill. But for the time being, there's an easy work-around:

    • In your checking account register, create a regular new transaction. Here, the Category field will allow you to select any of your accounts, not just investment accounts.
    • Save the transaction.
    • Click Transactions > Schedule Selected Transaction (or in the bottom menu bar, click Schedule > Schedule Selected Transaction)
    • Set the frequency/schedule

    That should suffice until they fix this odd little bug.

    Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 1993
  • jacobs
    jacobs Quicken Mac Subscription SuperUser, Mac Beta Beta

    @DougHoegh @Jon I created and submitted a bug report (Help > Report a Problem) with screenshots showing a regular transaction allowing transfers to all accounts and a scheduled transaction showing transfers only to investment accounts.

    These submissions unfortunately do not get acknowledged, so we can only hope someone on the Quicken end reads the report, validates it by reproducing it, and creates a bug report for the developers in their internal system. And then…? It could be fixed in the next release within a few days, or it could linger indefinitely until they get around to it. At least there's an easy enough work-around (see post above) until it's fixed.

    Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 1993
  • DougHoegh
    DougHoegh Quicken Mac Subscription Member ✭✭
    edited January 16

    Jacobs Thanks

  • jacobs
    jacobs Quicken Mac Subscription SuperUser, Mac Beta Beta

    @DougHoegh When you were on with Quicken Chat Support, were they able to understand the problem and see the issue? (It's often easier, I think, to use their telephone support so you can allow the Quicken representative to connect to your Mac and see exactly what you're seeing; a picture can be literally worth a thousand words!) Did they agree it was a bug and document it? Did they give you a tracking number?

    Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 1993
  • DougHoegh
    DougHoegh Quicken Mac Subscription Member ✭✭

    Jacobs They did not agree to call it a bug and no tracking or case number was started. The person I was chatting with kept saying it must be a corrupt file and first ask me to close and reopen, then told me to go back a version. But when I did that I couldn't open my current file because Quicken kept saying it was upgraded to 8.0 and it couldn't open. So I gave up, kept it at 8.0, then did report the issue through the report tool in quicken itself similar to what Jon did. After I reloaded V8.0 my database opened without problem and I used the tip you mentioned above to set up my Apple Card Bill pay routine. Thanks Again.

  • jacobs
    jacobs Quicken Mac Subscription SuperUser, Mac Beta Beta

    @DougHoegh Thanks for providing the results of your chat with Quicken Support. Ugh, it's so frustrating when a Support representative immediately calls the user's data file corrupt; bona fide corruption in Quicken Mac data files with regard to transactions is pretty rare, to the best of my knowledge from what I see here. Did they do any testing at all? It's easy to verify that this bug exists in a new, blank data file.

    I just created a new test file. I created three manual accounts: checking, credit card, and brokerage account. There are no transactions yet in this data file. I started a new transaction in the Checking account and the Category field dropdown menu shows, correctly, that I could select to transfer to any of the 3 accounts:

    Then tried to create a new scheduled transaction (new bill), and verified the bug that the Category field dropdown here does NOT allow transfers to accounts other than investment accounts:

    This test took me approximately one minute, and proves the issue is not with a corrupted data file because it appears in a new, created-from-scratch data file with zero transactions!

    Hopefully the Report a Problem submissions will be forwarded to the developers.

    Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 1993
  • jacobs
    jacobs Quicken Mac Subscription SuperUser, Mac Beta Beta

    Well, this may go down as the fastest bug fix in history! The developers just released version 8.0.1 to fix a few bugs, and this problem appears to be fixed!

    I was just going to create a new Report a Problem with the simplified file and screen shots I posted above, when it popped up that 8.0.1 was available, so I installed it and did a quick test. What a surprise that it was fixed!

    (For what it's worth, beta testers like @Jon and I received a pre-release version of 8.0.1 late last week, and the bug was present in that build of 8.0.1. The actual release of 8.0.1. is a slightly newer build, and the bug is gone. So perhaps the developers had already been aware of this problem and fixed it over the past few days — but I'll choose to believe that the Problem report submitted this afternoon was seen, a developer recognized a small mistake in a line of code, fixed it, and it made it into tonight's release. 🤣)

    After you install 8.0.1, can you verify that the issue is, indeed, fixed?

    Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 1993
  • DougHoegh
    DougHoegh Quicken Mac Subscription Member ✭✭

    that news is awesome. Maybe this MAC development group is going to be quick with bug fixes. Now if someone could just fix the broken connection with my investments through AssetMark and their connector ewealthmanager. Manually inputting all the transactions is a pain.

  • jacobs
    jacobs Quicken Mac Subscription SuperUser, Mac Beta Beta

    Maybe this MAC development group is going to be quick with bug fixes. 

    I've observed that the Quicken Mac development team does try to be pretty quick fixing something they inadvertently broke while adding a new feature. But don't expect all bug fixes to be so quick! 😂 Some issues linger for months or years.

    As for connectivity issues, that doesn't involve the Quicken Mac development team. Unfortunately, the standards used for banking connectivity in the US are not iron-clad enough to prevent problems from coming up. There are more than 10,000 financial institutions, and so in any given week, dozens if not hundreds are making changes to their websites or servers, some of which break connectivity with their party applications like Quicken. Quicken is a small company and can't manage agreements and technical support for them all, so they use a third-party provider, Intuit, for connectivity with financial institutions. Once a problem is reported and confirmed, Intuit has to determine if they can fix the issue entirely from their end, or if they need to reach out to the financial institution for help in resolving the problem. Or, in your case, there's yet another party: the company the financial institution contracts with for customer external connectivity. So just isolating what the problem is and who needs to do what to fix it can take lots of time and back-and-forth. And if a financial institution needs to make changes in the code on their servers, it's often a low priority compared to their own websites and data security, so connectivity issues with Quicken can drag on for weeks or months before being fixed. Broken connectivity is clearly the largest weak point in the Quicken user experience, and there's not much Quicken can do on its own to improv it.

    Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 1993
  • DougHoegh
    DougHoegh Quicken Mac Subscription Member ✭✭

    Jacobs, totally makes sense. I was optimistic when an announcement came out a couple of days ago that the issue was resolved, but when I tried I see the same issue. I did respond and received an acknowledgment that the announcement was premature and the issue is still there. I'll just continue to do my transactions manually and hope some day it's fixed.

  • jacobs
    jacobs Quicken Mac Subscription SuperUser, Mac Beta Beta

    @DougHoegh I think that sometimes, Intuit thinks they have a problem fixed with a financial institution, so they inform Quicken the problem is fixed and closed their support ticket, and Quicken updates their alert to say the problem is resolved. And then Quicken customers try and find the problem persists… so customers report to Quicken it's still broken, and Quicken has to open a new ticket with Intuit to say it's still broken, and the process repeats. Sigh. In some cases, it may be sloppy work by Intuit or by the financial institution; in some cases, I suspect the problems don't show up in testing and only show themselves when live user accounts and transactions are processed.

    Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 1993