Basic Quicken Bill Pay question

I use US Bank and pay all my bills via Quicken. It's free. See the definition of free below. So I enter the payee information (just once), set up my pin vault and all my accounts (checking to savings to investments). If I pay a bill using Quicken then that is transmitted to my bank. If the bank can pay the bill via electronic transfer they will. If not they will cut a physical check and mail it at their expense.

Free = having $10,000 sit in one of their savings accounts earning a whopping .01% interest. If you have $10k to spare just to please US Bank then go for it. One thing I do like about this bottom dweller is they have branches inside the grocery stores we use. That's a big convenience for ATM transactions.

LOL why not open a Citibank everything counts account. You can also open an E-savings account which pays 5% currently. This account also requires you to maintain $10K between savings and checking except atleast you get a decent interest rate on your money.

If you dont have $10K to leave in an account you can always get HSBC "Free Checking Account" which also includes free Quicken BillPay.

Uh .... LOL .... because I really don't feel like mailing in deposits. I like having branches locally. Citibank has ATM's in over 5,000

7-11's and not one of them lets you deposit money. Thanks but no thanks. Not worth the hassle.

Sam take a look at this Intuit web page that lists the Financial Institutions that support Quicken, . What you want is a FI that provides/supports Direct Connect, this allows you to enter transactions into Quicken and then upload them to the FI for processing/payment.

Quicken Bill Pay is a sperate service from Direct Connect, and as you know costs $9.95 per month. A FI may or may not charge for Direct Connect access to an account, but if you have Direct Connect access that will be the only fee charged.

HTH, and that I have not confused you any.

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Thanks for the listing of Banks and Financial Institutions that support Direct Connect. I found two accounts that I'd been using Web Connect for that also supported Direct Connect. One question, I have Quicken

2005 Premier and I don't think it supports transaction uploads to my bank. I had done this in earlier versions of Quicken, but I think they Intuit dropped this feature out around 2004 then put it back in around 2006.

"Don in San Antonio" wrote in

I don't think Intuit dropped the ability to send billpay instructions to your financial institution for any Quicken version.

I have Q2005 Deluxe and I am able to use BofA's billpay by sending instructions from Quicken.

I am not able to do the same for USAA however. At one time USAA allowed this, but for some reason - cost, I presume - they stopped permitting it.

I think it is all in the fi's hands.

This is somewhat of a coincidence. I also bank with USAA Federal Savings and had uploaded transactions. Later I discovered this feature wasn't available.

For me It's not a big deal because most of my bills are utilities bills that are automatically paid or credit card transactions. Even the credit card gets paid automatically at the end of each billing period. If something happened to me it might be several months before any noticed I was gone.

"Don in San Antonio" wrote

I guessed that you might be using USAA since you are in San Antonio and since the situation matched what I experienced.

I just found the following in an old email from USAA dated May

17, 2004, in response to a question I submitted at their web site.

---------------------- Thank you for your recent e-mail regarding Quicken and Microsoft Money BillPay service. After careful consideration, USAA has decided to discontinue functionality for Quicken and MS Money BillPay due to increasing support costs and customer feedback. Our focus will be on supporting the Web BillPay product, which offers additional features not available in Quicken and MS Money BillPay. You will still be able to download all of your account activity through Quicken and MS Money and any transactions made through Web BillPay will be included.

We understand this will be an inconvenience for you and apologize. We would like to assist you in the transition to another service. There are alternatives that will likely suit your needs. You are also able to directly enroll for BillPay services offered via Quicken and MS Money. This will allow you to keep all of your payee information and continue to pay bills via the software.

--------------------------

Actually, it wasn't an inconvenience for me since I wasn't using billpay back then.

I'm impressed again with your records. USAA has given me good service and they offer Quicken Direct Connect service which I think is a real plus.

It's not all bad news for those that bank at USAA. I remember one time not too long ago when they sent all members a free copy of Quicken basic. You can't beat that kind of service unless you give members the premier version :-)

Actually, they sent me the Deluxe version... And yes, USAA is one of the few financial orgizations I still trust.