Is everyone frustrated with Bills&Income functionality ??

Member ✭✭✭
edited November 2023 in Paying Bills, Online Billers & Reminders (Windows)

I started using the Bills/Income tab to track online bills and make payments back in June of 2022, and for most of a year, it worked great. I had online bills for at least 8 billers and I could pay most of them using "Quick Pay"

Bank of America Card

Chase Rewards Card

Costco Card (Citibank)

Fidelity Signature Visa Card (Elan Financial)

Verizon Visa Card

My Electric Company

JC Penney

Waste Management (Trash Hauler)

Over the past several months most of this has stopped working and numerous calls to Quicken Support have been useless. Where things are at now:

Bank of America Card - Quicken stopped being able to track this biller and now, it seems to say I need to have a register for the card, before it'll do anything.

Chase Freedom Rewards Card - first Quick Pay went away, but Check Pay still worked. Now, the biller gets a warning triangle saying my account is no longer valid. Downloads still work fine.

Costco Card (Citibank) - first Quick Pay went away, but Check Pay still worked. Now, the biller gets a warning triangle saying my account is no longer valid. Downloads still work fine.

Fidelity Signature Visa Card (Elan Financial) - bill tracking and Quick Pay continued to work until recently, but now nothing works . There is a notice about a known problem with no ETA for a fix.

Verizon Visa Card - bill tracking and Quick Pay continued to work until recently, but then seemed to get a little flakey. Now it's worse and Quicken allows me to schedule a Quick Pay but then it fails. Downloads still work fine.

My Electric Company - this still works.

JC Penney - no known failures, but this card gets very little use.

Waste Management (Trash Hauler) - worked OK until May, but I've stopped using them :-)

Do I need to give up on Bills&Income and just go back to printing checks or log into each web-site and authorize an EFT every month???

Thanks for any advice…

paul

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Best Answer

  • Quicken Windows Subscription Windows Beta Beta
    Answer ✓

    To answer: Yes, just give up and go back to each web site and authorize EFT. Unless you are very patient or like to work hard at paying bills. I am trying both right now. It might take quite a while to fix QBM.

Answers

  • Quicken Windows Subscription SuperUser ✭✭✭✭✭

    If your bank (the one that runs your checking account) recently required you to reauthorize your checking account and/or your bank has changed from "Direct Connect" to either "Express Web Connect" or "Express Web Connect+" you can no longer use Online Bill Pay direct to the bank or Quicken Bill Manager's Quick Pay function. The bank no longer supports this function through Quicken.

    IMHO, you have these alternatives (in no particular order of preference):

    1. Use Quicken Bill Manager's Check Pay making sure to submit payment early enough (at least 3 weeks before due date) to allow time for delivery and processing. Note: limited number of free transactions per month.
    2. Logon to the bank's website and schedule your bill pay payments to be executed by the bank from your checking account. In parallel to that, in Quicken use a regular Scheduled Reminder to record your payment. Repeat both actions every time another payment is due.
    3. Bypass Bill Manager. Let the biller's (or credit card company's) computer system do all the work for you. Logon to the biller's website once and set up their Autopay, APS, Direct debit, etc. service to make the current payment and all future payments on Due Date directly from your checking account. In parallel to that, in Quicken, every month, record a regular Scheduled Reminder to keep track of your payments before they come due.
    4. Write (or print with Quicken) a paper check and mail it to the biller, making sure to mail payment early enough (at least 10 days before due date) to allow time for delivery and processing.

    I've been using method #3 for decades, since before the Internet and transaction download capabilities were even introduced. It's easy to get used to this process. And I have yet to miss a single payment.

  • Quicken Windows Subscription SuperUser ✭✭✭✭✭

    Here are the banks in your list that I know of that have eliminated DC and EWC and cut in EWC+. As noted by @UKR above, EWC+ is not compatible with Quick Pay but it is my understanding that Check Pay should still work. If you do not wish to use to use Check Pay with them then you could either log into your online accounts and set up bill payments there or you could log into your online billers accounts and schedule pull-payments there (where they will debit your checking account). Or, as you said, you could write out checks yourself and pay them.

    • Bank of America Card - converted to EWC+ about a year ago.
    • Chase Rewards Card - converted to EWC+ a little over a year ago.

    Regarding your other accounts:

    • Costco Card (Citibank) - first Quick Pay went away, but Check Pay still worked. Now, the biller gets a warning triangle saying my account is no longer valid. Downloads still work fine. —>This is an EWC connection so Quick Pay and Check Pay should work provided Citibank did not drop support for them. I do not use Quicken's Bill Manager so I do not know about this, but is there a way to reset the Online Biller? Or does it need to be deleted and then added, again?
    • Fidelity Signature Visa Card (Elan Financial) - bill tracking and Quick Pay continued to work until recently, but now nothing works . There is a
      notice about a known problem with no ETA for a fix.—>The issue you are referring to was resolved 3 days ago. Try connecting again.
    • Verizon Visa Card - bill tracking and Quick Pay continued to work until recently, but then seemed to get a little flakey. Now it's worse and Quicken allows me to schedule a Quick Pay but then it fails. Downloads still work fine.—>This card is issued by Synchrony Bank which I do not think has converted to EWC+. You might want to check out this Support Article to see if anything stated in there is helpful:
      Site faviconQuick Pay/Check Pay Errors & Troubleshooting
       .

    Quicken Classic Premier (US) Subscription: R62.16 on Windows 11 Home

  • Quicken Windows Subscription Windows Beta Beta
    Answer ✓

    To answer: Yes, just give up and go back to each web site and authorize EFT. Unless you are very patient or like to work hard at paying bills. I am trying both right now. It might take quite a while to fix QBM.

  • Member ✭✭✭

    Thanks for the responses!! Replies In reverse order:

    Randy 415 - Thanks for the direct answer :-) I think bill-paying is the most basic function and should be easy. Bill Manager is a great concept, but it's not stable and really needs to be!!!

    Boatnmaniac - Thanks for the very specific comments. I know that Chase and Bank of America switched to EWC+, so I lost Quick Pay for those billers but continued to use Check Pay. This worked for a while. Then at some point:

    • I could not re-add BoA ("Quicken is trying to connect"), and now when I try Quicken tells me I have to track the card in a register, which I've never done, because the card doesn't get much use.
    • My two Chase cards kept getting the triangle of death ("account invalid - delete and re-add") - I've re-added to Bill Manager again and we'll see.
    • Costco (Citibank) kept getting marked with the triangle of death, too, so I went back to just downloading transactions, which I can still do with DC. I may try to downgrade to EWC and re-add it now, but for a while, trying to add the Biller without switch to EWC would cause Quicken to crash.
    • Thanks for the tip on Elan! I have been able to add the Biller again, and it claims Quick Pay - We'll see, when the bill comes in!!

    UKR - Thanks for your suggestions! My experience seems to have been a little different from yours. My bank (Citizens) switched from DC to EWC in May 2022, which was a pain, since I liked the online-transfer. That's when I tried using Bill Manager, but despite the bank using EWC, Quick Pay worked great for me until fairly recently. Your alternatives are mostly good though I think #2 is too much work, and for #3, I'm paranoid about authorizing arbitrary autopay from my checking account, because we do sometimes run close to the bone :-) and I don't want overdraft fees!! We do print checks for bills that aren't regular or payees that can't accept online payments.

    Thanks all. I do hope they get the kinks worked out — including the fact that there's now a connectivity issue with Citizens Bank!!

  • Quicken Windows Subscription Member ✭✭✭✭

    For what is worth here is an announcement on them trying to make QuickPay more reliable.

    Please give us your feedback: Increased Quick Pay Reliability

    Quicken Kathryn

    Here is also a comment on this and a pointer to how the different bill payment systems work, and a guess of what this announcement above actually means:

    Chris_QPW

    In reference to the original post, the history of this is the bill presentment came first, and when "Quicken Bill Pay" was dropped by the third-party service, Quicken Inc turned again to that same interface/third-party service to also provide the bill payment system now known as Quicken Bill Manager/QuickPay/CheckPay. So, adding a "bill" (without the payment part) is the same system going back to Quicken 2015. I tried for years do to get this work reliably and was never able to do it. I think that is the nature of the system. There isn't a standardize way to get the bills and as such this third-party service is hack biller's websites trying to provide this service.

    I have no intention of ever using such bill systems I instead just use automatic bill payments on my biller's websites. Set once and forget. Not in that would be sort of the same system that QuickPay is using with a couple major differences. One is that I'm a human, not some script that can't handle if they change the biller's website. The second is I just schedule the bill to be paid when due, so it is do once and that is it. When QuickPay people are trying to do things like schedule a new payment each month. So, right there you have 12 times more chance of failure.

    Maybe with what sounds like direct ACH transfers it will be more reliable, but why you I change very reliable system I'm using for this "chance"? Also, I should note that almost all of these payments are done to my credit card, so I don't even have to worry much about cash flow except to pay off the credit cards (which are also on automatic payment) from my checking account, and I have 20 to 30 days' notice that such a payment is going to be made when my credit card statement comes in.

    Anyways when this announcement came out, I decided to try setting up the bill presentment system for my bills.

    Chase credit cards, setup, no problem.

    Water bill, not available.

    HOA bill, not available.

    Xfinity, hung for a long time and said it would work on it in the background for a few days. Past experience with this kind of thing was that it never resolved itself.

    Same for Xfinity mobile bill.

    Costo Citi card, Quicken repeatedly crashed every time I tried to set this one up.

    PG&E, hung up…

    Needless to say, I just deleted the whole mess.

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  • Quicken Windows Subscription Moderator mod

    Hello @Chris_QPW,

    To clarify, the ACH backup isn't available yet, but will be available with the next QWin update, which will be available soon. It will not be a separate, selectable payment method, but will be a backup for QuickPay (if the QuickPay payment fails, it would reprocess using ACH if possible).

    Xfinity, Xfinity Mobile, and the Costco Citi Anywhere Visa Card all show as having Degraded connection, which means that most people are unable to connect; the issue is a known issue that has been reported to the appropriate channels, but we have no ETA.

    I hope this information is helpful!

    Quicken Kristina

    Make sure to sign up for the email digest to see a round up of your top posts.

  • Quicken Windows Subscription Member ✭✭✭✭

    @Quicken Kristina thank you very much for the information.

    Side note, it seems like a lot of the bills spend a lot of time in the "Degraded connection" status.

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    This is my website: http://www.quicknperlwiz.com/
  • Quicken Windows Subscription SuperUser, Windows Beta Beta
    edited October 2023

    Just for info:

    My credit card bills I always try to connect to reminders ALL fail each month before payments are due so could never depend on Bills Tab

    Bank of America Visa
    Bank of America MasterCard
    Amazon Store Card
    Chase Visa

    Almost every time get the triangle, Click Fix it and they say need to delete and re-add.

  • Member ✭✭✭

    I agree that this essential functionality must be reliable. It's similarly important to me to make sure that my bills are paid on time, not only for out of concern for credit score, but also for the $35 fee that credit card companies charge for late payments.

    My strategy has been to continue to try to use the bill payment function and monitor progress. If payment doesn't go through, I go to the credit card web site and authorize payment directly. Then I try to be a squeaky wheel to Quicken support, because it would be really great if this stuff were all bullet proof. It's a sacrifice, but I make it for the team :-)

  • Quicken Windows Subscription Member ✭✭✭✭

    @harterpk I was going to suggest that if you were going to put yourself through that you might want to comment on the thread created for feedback on the fact the "backup ACH transfer", but I see that not only did they close it for comments, they removed the comments that were there:

    Please give us your feedback: Increased Quick Pay Reliability

    Quicken Kathryn

    BTW just to be clear, even if there were zero complaints about the bill payment system, I wouldn't be using it. For something like 20 years now I have had this pretty much completely automated with no need for any "bill payment system", not even the one from my financial institution, which I think I have used like once.

    What I do it is set my bills to be paid automatically on the biller's site, almost entirely drawing the money from one credit card that pays me cash rewards. That means that almost all of the "cash flow" is nothing more than making sure that I have enough in my checking account to pay my credit cards as they come due (which are also automatically paid from the checking account).

    Why would I give up a system that has been working 100% for like 20 or more years for a "maybe"?

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