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Not happy with new subscription feature

Greg Brown

I have all of my subscriptions "tagged" as subscription and can produce a report of all of my subscriptions. When I ran the auto subscription process, it ADDED new "subscription" entries for my bills, and set them for the wrong Pay From account. When I add them manually from the subscription tab, they are also duplicated. I am now going through my bill reminders and deleting all of the duplicate reminders Quicken added when it identified a subscription. Fortunately Quicken didn't identify many of my subscriptions, only 6, so I am editing my reminders, deleting the Quicken added reminder and changing the reminder to "subscription" from "bill" but I am NOT crazy about Quicken deciding to change it to "Auto" entry. I don't like auto entries and would prefer that be a decision I make.

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Quicken James

Hello @Greg Brown,

Thank you for sharing your experience! I am happy to help.

After looking into this feature further, it is designed to auto-enter the subscriptions into your account register. That being said, you are able to edit that setting in the subscription's menu.

This Help Article talks about this feature. It also has other useful tips on how to use the subscription tab.

Please let us know if you have any further questions or issues.

I hope this helps.

Greg Brown

Actually I didn't pose any questions. I was relaying my experience and what I had to do to resolve them. You didn't address Quicken creating a duplicate entry for the bill reminders that Quicken identified as subsriptions. And there is no mention of the created reminder having the wrong Pay From account. With the issue that we've experienced for over a year with "duplicate entries" I would think that caution would be called for when introducing a change like this, and thorough testing as well.

Thanks,

Greg

Chris_QPW

This is where keeping a good backup, especially before trying a new feature helps.

Carl Davidson

Since we're reporting experiences with the new Subscriptions feature, I'll just quickly say that I updated to 10.30 this morning and the Subscriptions feature worked exactly as expected. It found all of my subscriptions, as well as a number of regular bills, and accurately made the right choice for about 90% off them. I changed the selection for the rest and now look forward to seeing if the rest of the feature work correctly.

YMMV.

Sceptic

@Greg Brown I'm sorry your first experience with the feature wasn't a positive one. I can certainly understand the frustration of having to clean up duplicate reminders after already investing time in setting up an organized reminder system.

I tried the new feature early this morning and for me it works great. Sure, there was some cleanup, but I figured out right away that using "Auto Identify" would cause duplicates. It scans your account registers for recurring bills and subscriptions and if the payee doesn't match exactly to the reminders already set up, it will create a duplicate.

I probably am using it slightly differently than intended but it is something that I will definitely use. I have around 27 autopay bills that are set up to be drawn from a dedicated credit card or the checking account. I set them all up as subscriptions. Now I have a list of autopay bills along with the accounts that the vendor or payee draws from. If anything happens to the credit card or checking account and I need to set up new accounts, I have the list of autopay bills in Quicken and I can notify the vendors or payees immediately.

Ultimately, it's a tool that's available for those who want to use it, but each user will need to decide whether it fits their own workflow and preferences.

Chris_QPW

I'm curious, how would the payee's name ever be different than the reminder's? It seems strange to me that one would have a reminder for a certain payee and then change the payee's name once it was in the register.

Sceptic

The payee name gets changed or updated in the register, but not the bill reminder. This can easily happen with credit card payments where the payee on either side of the transfer transaction can be different.

Sceptic

@Chris_QPW it can happen with any reminder transaction. If you updated the payee on the reminder transaction, but didn't update the transactions in the account register, then "Auto Identify" will pull the old payee name, and vice versa, if the payee name in the account register was changed but not the reminder, duplicates can happen.

Chris_QPW

I understand, I just didn't think it would be "common". Transfers on the other hand, being two sided and not affecting the payee on the other side seems like something that would be more common.

Greg Brown

It's not the payee that changed it's the pay from account. I use Wells Fargo as my bank that does online billpay. When the duplicates were created by Quicken, it chose "Apple" as the "From Account" on the bill reminders. I'm glad it's working for everyone.

Chris_QPW

Oh, it is far from "everyone" this is another thread with a few complaints on it. It definitely seems hit or miss for a few reasons. I think yours with the account is "different" than most though.

I wonder what is throwing it off, it seems very simple, if you find a repeating transaction in account XXX then the account for "from" is that account. If it was a transfer, then I might see it getting the "category" wrong, but even then, if you used the same two accounts for all of them it shouldn't be a problem.

Long ago I created a Category of Subscription along with subs-categories such as Streaming etc. So I don't find any use for this new feature - especially since it seems less than perfect so far. I wonder how many users find it helpful compared to more pressing matters - one more thing they need to spend the effort to fix and maintain, but that is a different discussion.

Chris_QPW

I find it ironic that, they have time for such features (which BTW have been requested, so this isn't completely out of the blue), but not the time to fix that stupid popup up for entering a memorized payee, which would be trivial and tons of people have complained about from day one, and I might add that I never seen anyone actually request.

JCMcCarter

This user is thrilled that Quicken conceived and implemented the Subscription Tab. And the fact that they implemented it to show if there was a monthly or annual fee associated with the subscription as well as the annual expense is genius. Yes, the implementation is not perfect. (I don't know why they chose to place the fee automatically in the register rather than default to mentioning it as a Reminder, hopefully that will be "fixed". ) I wish I'd have thought of BJ's solution a long time ago, but I didn't. This Subscription Tab is going to save me a lot of time that I've been spending keeping a Spreadsheet updated! Thank you Quicken!

Quicken James

Hi @Greg Brown,

Thank you for that follow-up information.

Due to the nature of this issue, it is recommended that you contact Quicken Support directly for further assistance, as they can walk you through troubleshooting steps in real time and escalate the situation as needed. The Quicken Support phone number can be found through this link here. Phone support is available from 5:00 am PT to 5:00 pm PT, Monday through Friday. I apologize that I could not be of more assistance!

Thanks again.