Quicken Bill Pay Check returned to me by payee - now what

I use Quicken bill pay and when they pay a bill by check it is actually a check that is drawn on your checking account (with your banks routing number and your account number). I presume that is your case here. (rather then an electronic transfer). You can't cancel the payment because there is no way for the Service to get the check back. If this is the case you can just delete the check (like it was never written). You may want to zero the balance and mark it void with a memo as to what it was for etc. The check will have a Bill Pay number, just mark the transaction as cleared and then when you balance the check book mark as reconciled.

My understanding is that once Quicken Bill Pay sends the check they are out of the loop as far as the payment goes. My experience confirms this. If a payment was via my checking account (with a paper check) when I called the bill pay service they said there wasn't much they could do to resolve the problem. The only thing they could do was confirm the check was mailed. I had to work with the creditor to get the problem resolved which meant I had to get a copy of the canceled check to show the creditor. This only happened a couple of times in over 20 years.

For electronic payments the story was different. The service took an active role in getting the problem resolved. As with the paper checks having this sort of problem was rare.

Hope this helps Marty

Doesn't this mean that the OP has to have his bank cancel the check somehow? The check has already been deducted from his account even though if it was never cashed, right? The OP could tear up the check, but the money is still already drawn out of his account, right? In other words, even though Quicken bill pay is out of the picture, and the person the check was written TO is out of the picture, the money has still been taken out of your account and it's your BANK that has to take an action to put the money back into your account. I realize the question was how do you get Quicken to recognize what has happened. But I wanted to make the additional point that you need to have your bank realize that check will never be cashed.

Yes but Marc stated the uncashed check was returned to him by the payee so it was never presented to the bank for payment. As far as the bank is concerned no check was written.

Marty

"DP" wrote

Not if it worked as Martin says it does. The check was "drawn" (written) on the op's account by Quicken BillPay, but never

*cashed* by the payee. Should be no difference between that and you writing a check which the payee returns to you uncashed. The bank doesn't know this check was written.

The way Quicken bill pay works is different for mailed checks and electronic payments.

For mailed checks, they write a check against your account, using your banks routing numbers and account number. It's as if you had written it. It doesn't get charged till it clears your bank.

For electronic payment, they deduct the payment and credit it to the payee.

In the first case, they are out of the loop. In the second case, they are responsible for any troubles.

In my experience, they are a super reliable, responsive company, and I expect they would deal with anything that went wrong in the second case - or in the first if the check didn't arrive.

To finish the story, based on advice above, and similar advice from Quicken bill pay, I manually reconciled the transaction and added and reconciled a compensating deposit. This has worked and quicken is not confused.

Thanks for all the help.

Marc - I was following this, and want to ask you something. I assume (because there's some discussion that I am hazy in following all the details!) that the method of payment for you was Billpay cutting a real check that they mailed to the payee which was returned to you uncashed, right?.

If that was the case, then why didn't you just simply use a EDIT-->VOID TRANSACTION against your register entry (which receives a 'c' upon voiding, and an 'R' when you reconcile) on the original transaction rather than manually reconciling the withdrawal followed by another manual compensating deposit?

That's what I've done in these cases, just as if I mailed a returned check out of my own checkbook.

Fear :-)

I knew that the transaction existed in the quicken bill pay data base, as well as in my quicken register. I was afraid something might get confused if I voided it and then connected to bill pay again. I also didn't know if I could void it. Since no one posted testimony that the void approach would work, I didn't try it.

I have used the void technique for my own checks when they get lost and I know they will never be cashed.