Quicken and Checkfree

The best source for your questions is your bank.

Quicken bill pay is an online bill paying service, used primarily by folks whose banks do not offer an alternative. You can enter payments from within Quicken, and send and receive transactions using the One Step Update.

Many banks also offer a bill pay service that works with Quicken. Some banks charge a fee if you want to schedule payments/download directly from within the software, but allow web-based payment scheduling.

There are still banks that offer free direct-connect from within the software - Commerce Bank is one.

The upshoot is that you need to call your bank, or look on your bank's website, to see exactly if and how your bank integrates with Quicken.

Yes.

OK, thanks. Where (Q2007)?

Thanks. My bank, Navy FCU, is of no help. Account download only via qfx file transfer. Navy web bill pay is done by checkfree, but they won't work with quicken.

Every version I know of and I've been running Quicken since Windows 95 came out????

What doesn't work? AFAIK, Check Free doesn't depend on the financial software at all, it'll work with anything or without any financial software.

Thanks, I really appreciate it. I am trying to find out where in Q2007 to set up checkfree as the bill pay. All I can seem to access is quicken billpay for $9.95.

You don't need to set up anything in Quicken, go to

Thanks, that I do have with Navy Fed. There web bill pay is quicken and I can just do a qfx file transfer between navy fcu and quicken to import paid data. I guess what i was looking for was to use quicken to received or import the electronic bills, manage with the quicken calendar and budget and then schedule right in quicken. MS Money does this with checkfree, I was looking for the same functionality as the $9.95 service of quicken bill pay, but with a free provider. Also, I opened a checkfree account to try and import from them, they only do qif files which quicken won't take.

And for NFCU, you may not be able to. But clearly, it would be easier on the user, if they could.

Yes, it will. CheckFree doesn't depend on the fi permitting the exchange of billpay info to/from Quicken. Just for the fi to permit CheckFree to exchange BillPay info with the fi.

According to Q2007, "Quicken Bill Pay" is available for NFCU via Quicken. Trouble is: QuickenBillpay does not use CheckFree any more (I think the current Quicken BillPay company is called Metavante ... or close).

(I should add that Q2007 thinks that NFCU can do Express Web Connect ... but NFCU will not allow it.)

The answer for the op: call NFCU.

What I didn't make clear about this statement is that I believe it means you can not use Quicken to send/receive billpay instructions if you are using CheckFree to do BillPay with NFCU.

Yep. That is the way I currently use Quicken software with my Wachovia account. The bills are scheduled on the Wachovia website, and the data is transferred into my software, using the Wachovia "Account download" tab on the website.

All do-able. Enter the bills right into the software as scheduled payments. They will show up in the calendar, very useful for planning purposes.

Schedule, yes, INITIATE - no. At least, not through direct connect with your bank for free -- if your bank does not offer it. And, it looks like yours does not.

"You will not be able to use Quicken or Money to initiate bill payments through the Navy Federal Online Account Access service. Navy Federal offers a Web Bill Pay service as a companion product to its Account Access service; however, you must enroll in this service separately. "

I was unaware that MS Money offered a free billpay option. I was unable to find any mention of a free interface on the Microsoft site. Specifically, it stated "To pay a bill online, you must have at least one account that allows online transactions. Contact your bank or brokerage to find out if it offers both online statements and bill payment through Money."

Not an option for you. Navy Federal - like many banks - wants you to schedule bills through their website.

"If it does, sign up with the bank for the new service, and then set up your account to use online bill payment and online statements. If your financial institution does not offer online bill payment, you can still sign up for online bill payment through another provider, such as MSN® Bill Pay."

Some financial institutions still offer free webconnect with bill pay. More and more that option is disappearing as software companies like Intuit and Microsoft charge ever increasing service fees to 'participating' banks.

Why would you want to open a checkfree account? It is a web-based bill payment service! If you are willing to schedule your bills at a website, why not use your own bank's website? As you noted, your bank even allows direct download via webconnect into Quicken.

Navy does not allow web download of it's bill pay service. I thought it did, but navy only support qfx download of checking, savings and credit accounts.

I'll have to do this manually into quicken so I can budget. I was just hoping to transfer the stuff directly from Navy web bill pay.

Yup. Life would be so much easier if they would just offer the file download from bill pay! ;-)

After further exploration of Money last night, it was current checkfree subscribers only. The version now available for users is "mycheckfree.com" under some name "scout" and it only offer qif transfer for older versions of quicken.

Yes, but not the bills that my billers post electronically. I will just key those into quicken, luckily, I am not too far into debt and have minimal utilities.

I have been using Quicken Bill Pay for a few months. I have Checking Accounts at three banks and two credit unions. Only one bank offers Direct Connect from Quicken - Bank of America and it is not my primary Bank. The remaining offer Express Web Connect and one only Web Connect. All have Online Banking available for free at their websites.

Quicken Bill Pay allows me - from either Quicken or the Web - to initiate payments from any one of those Banks (8 Accounts in total). Like Checkfree, I do receive a copy of my billing statements at the Quicken Bill Pay Website. If I initiate a payment from the web, the next time I run run step update, my payment is downloaded into the appropriate Bank Account so I can see future scheduled payments. When the payment clears, my financial institutions transmit the clearing and it reconciles just fine.

The advantage for me is that I don't need to log into multiple websites to initate payments (although I can do this without fees). The payments is entered into my register when it is scheduled (I don't have to initate on the web and then enter it manually in Quicken). I can download the PDF statements or print the non-PDF statements as a PDF document and attach the images to either the transactions or accounts. For me, this is a time saver and worth the $9.95 per month and actually reduces the amount of time I spend in Quicken as I get all of the advantages of Direct Connect with all five institutions (8 accounts) verse a fee just to Direct Connect with Bank of America.