Online bill pay amounts are wrong

Question

Hi, I am having issues with online bill pay projections.  I want to automatically pay my credit card statement balance, and I am not able to get bill pay to calculate the correct amount in advance.  It continually projects the minimum payment, and I have to go in and manually edit it to the statement balance each time.  How can I reconfigure the online bill link to project the correct statement balance each month?

Boatnmaniac · Accepted Answer

@Luka731 - What you might want to consider doing is something that I and many others who pay off their credit card bills in full each month do.

Instead of using Quicken's Bill Manager to download the bills and then making bill payment to the credit card company, we have logged into our online credit card accounts and set up recurring auto bill payments there with the payment option set to "pay last statement balance in full" (or something similar to that).  Then the credit card company will automatically process the ACH debit against your checking account with never a concern about a bill payment being late, not being made or getting somehow sidetracked.  If for some reason the bill payment does not take place the biller is totally responsible for that and will not penalize you with a late payment or interest charge.

Also, have the credit card company notify you by text or email of what your statement balance is each month (more regarding this below).

Then set up a manual bill reminder for the credit card.  In the reminder you have the option to select one of several options for the payment amount….a fixed amount or a variable amount based upon different scenarios.  For my small usage credit cards I select the payment estimate to be "the account balance" as shown in the account register in Quicken.  For my large usage credit cards I tend to select the payment estimate to be the average of the last 3-6 months.

Then each month when you get the text/email statement balance amount you can enter the next bill reminder.  That process will allow you to manually edit the payment amount that you were notified of by text/email before it gets entered.  When the credit card bill payment has posted at the bank and downloaded into Quicken, it will be matched to the bill reminder that was previously entered.

This can also be done with many billers, not just with credit cards….for free….and it is highly reliable.