Jeff P wrote:
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< snip
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I use EFT's (ACH's) to pay many of my bills too; mostly it is a
very beneficial service. But I would be much happier to using
electronic-billing/electronic-bill-paying instead if I could
replace most of my EFT's with them (which I can't since so few
payees offer ebill service).

The reason ebills/epay is better: you can not physically prevent
any previously authorized payee from taking money from your
account via EFT, except by closing the account ... and even that
won't work if it is a credit card account, which will accept
such charges even after it is closed. You may have legal
recourse if a payee withdraws money after you have ended your
relationship with them, but you do not have any way to actually
stop them from taking the money. This is a problem that ebills
will solve because the payee never is given access to your
account.

--
John Pollard
First initial underscore Last name at mchsi dot com
Please reply to newsgroup

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What you are doing here is using your bank's bill pay system to pay your
second bank. It sounds like the first bank has a way to catch bill
payments sent to other banks and funnel them into the ACH system.
That's nice. I don't believe this feature is widespread in bill pay
systems. With any bill pay system one could always setup a second bank
as a payee and the bill pay system sends a paper check to the second
bank, with your accent info printed on the check.

But MSN BP's transfers are direct Bank to Bank ACH transfers. This even
works when the originating bank (the 'from' bank) does not have their
own bill pay, nor any web or internet services at all. All you need is
the first bank's routing number and your account number. So I still
think this is a feature MSN BP has above and beyond any bank's bill pay.

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the US. Anyone includes any other bank. If the payee or bank doesn't
accept electronic payments they just get a paper check.

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Money, via the transaction protocol it and the banks use, is designed to
enroll in a bank's bill pay electronically. In Money, you click 'show
what online services this bank offers', Money gets the list of services
from the bank, and if bill pay is present, you click 'sign up for this
service'. Money validates that you are a customer of the bank, matches
your accounts you've already setup in Money (or prompts you to create
some) with your accounts at the bank, nd then sends your signup request,
and prompts you for a username and password if you haven't already
provided such. It's uncommon when doing this that you also have to
contact the bank directly to enable the bill pay service. However, what
is common is that you have to contact a bank to enable web based bill pay.

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record on the next day. So I don't really need to.

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"Retired Coal Miner" <...[at]...> wrote in message
news:ndednYygjKBaBUXfRVn-rg[at]comcast.com...
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You're right. I have no idea what is wrong with it, but something definately
isn't setup correctly.

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That I'm not sure on. I was going to try the $2.95 service but then it gave
me a free 3-month trial for the next level up. (What is it? $5.95?) Only a
couple of my bills are on the "ebills" list, and those companies I already
have setup to pull money out of my account via ACH automatically anyway. So,
I don't see ebills as really being that useful.

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Yes, well, NONE of the banks within 20 miles of my house offer such a
feature. I wish they did. At least having switched from the credit union to
this bank I have now, I can finally download statements from the website.
The credit union offers this feature the payee and memo fields are reverse
so it causes a bigger mess that I have to clean up in the Money file than it
was even worth.

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Actually you are wrong about this. With my credit union's online bill
payment feature, I was able to setup each of my other accounts as a payee. I
had to get some special instructions on how to do it, but it worked fine. I
just had to enter the other instituion's name as the first line of the
address, the street address of the institution as the second line of the
address, and where the account number goes I had to enter "RTN" followed by
the bank's routing number, followed by "CHK" for Checking or "SAV" for
Savings" followed by the account number.

Before I opened my account with this new bank I asked them if I would be
able to use the online bill payments feature to send money to my other
accounts. They say it can be done. I haven't been able to try it out yet
though, because I'm still waiting for them to process my application to
enroll in the online bill payment service. I don't know what is taking them
so long to turn it on. Maybe you should ask your bank if you can make online
payments to yourself at other institutions electronically.

BTW: I also setup a friend's account # in there and used the same system to
ACH money to his account one time. Worked just fine.

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That's good to know. I think I can get the new version for a pretty good
after-rebate deal at Sam's club, but I didn't really feel like putting up
with the hassle unless I had a reason to upgrade.

-Jeff



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I agree with Kevin's experience, I've also used MSN Bill Pay for several
years (always via the 'free' offers bundled with higher end versions of
Money) and it's worked great. The issues you're describing (password
prompts, failure to synchronize) are not normal.

When you pay bills using MSN BP, you do so from within Money, there's no
need to login to the MSN BP site to do this. The one exception is if you
receive bills electronically in MSN BP and want to pay via the 'Pay
Bill' link. I don't think you get the eBills option with the $2.95 per
month service, so not an issue for you.

When you using Money to simplify your finances, you don't want to do
dual data entry (on your bank's website, and then in Money). You're
evidently dealing with a bank that does not offer "Direct Services
(2-Way)" online services. If the bank had that, and the bank offered
bill pay with the services, you could pay the bills from within Money
using the Bank's bill pay service.

Some advantages to using MSN BP:
-If a bank offers no online services for Money, you can still MSN BP and
have the payments come out of that bank. Still need to wait for end of
the month for bank's paper statement to reconcile.
-MSN BP will do electronic transfers between banks, say from Bank X to
Credit Union Y. Online bill pay services from banks will never do this.

BTW, in past years one year or two years of MSN BP (the $6.95/month
option) was included in the higher end (Deluxe, Small Business, etc.)
versions of Money. This was so in M03 and M04. Not so in M05, and I
don't know about M06.


Jeff P wrote:

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The church transaction might possibly be a paper check. Or not, it depends
on whether the payee is setup for electronic transactions. I've had some
interesting revelations about who I thought would take electronic
transactions only to see it go through as a paper check. My dentist, for
instance, takes electronic. One of the large mortgage companies, a major,
national one, did not accept electronic and they had to get a paper check.
This didn't have anything to do with the Bill Pay service, I had CheckFree
at that time.

As for the transfer between checking accounts. I've never done that so I
don't know. However, I do now have a checking account and a home equity
line of credit with the same bank and, in Money I just setup the payment to
the home equity line as a regular, monthly ePay transfer transaction from my
checking account and submit it through MSN Bill Pay and it gets paid
correctly and shows up in Money, in both accounts, correctly without having
to wait until statements are downloaded. I setup the transaction in Money,
in my checking account, as a loan payment with the principal portion being
transferred to the HELOC and the interest portion going to the
Bills:Mortgage Interest expense account. I set the type to be an ePay and
when I submit it to Bill Pay Money is the one that enters the correct
amounts into the various accounts in Money. Bill Pay only sees a
transaction for the full loan payment to be sent to the payee (the bank
HELOC account), it doesn't care about whether it's a transfer or what. Bill
Pay is only paying the bill.

Maybe if you setup your "transfer" transaction to the other checking account
similarly to this it would work. I have yet to ever enter any transactions
directly from the Bill Pay website, only through Money.

Kevin

Kevin
"Jeff P" <jeffpNO[at]SPAMruralramp.net> wrote in message
news:11dd56mavg6vf1f[at]corp.supernews.com...
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"Kevin Campbell" <kcampbel[at]nospam.midmaine.com> wrote in message
news:OlT%23o3GiFHA.1244[at]TK2MSFTNGP14.phx.gbl...
- quote -


I tried the free trial last night and encountered less than pleasing
results. I attempted to make two transactions - one to donate to my church
(which has instructions on how to setup electronic donations through bill
pay services), the other to transfer funds to my other checking account at a
different bank. These seemed simple enough to test it out without risking
any harm on a real bill that needs to be paid on time.

The church donation seems to be working fine. I entered it in Microsoft
Money and it shows up in the register as well as in the status on the MSN
Bill Pay website. I'm not too sure how it is going to get there since all it
asked me for was a street address. I certainly hope they aren't planning on
mailing a paper check in since I know the church has been taking donations
from me electronically via my old credit union's account for the past year.
I'll keep an eye on this and see when it posts at the other end.

Unfortunately my transfer between accounts did not go as smoothly as I had
hoped. Microsoft Money seems to suggest that you can do this, but then when
you go to actually do it, it just takes you out to the MSN Bill Pay website.
I filled in the routing & account number to the second account I was
transferring the funds to, and submitted the transfer. After doing this
Microsoft Money found that I tampered with a second account, popped up, and
asked me which account this was. It had no trouble matching the accounts up
between MSN Bill Pay and Microsoft Money. However, there is no entry in the
Microsoft Money registers for either side of this transfer transaction.

I called MSN Bill Pay customer support as I couldn't figure out why the
church donation showed up in the reigster but the transfer did not, while
both show up on the website. They informed me that transfers between
accounts do not download into Microsoft Money from MSN Bill Pay. They will
only show up after I download the statement from the financial institution
which I do once a month. (If I do it more than once a month the instituion
sends me the same transactions from the beginning of the month as
duplicates, and things get to be quite a mess to parse through.) In other
words when the statements are downloaded there will be two half-transfer
transactions which probably will not recognize each other as being linked.
I'd have to do what I've been doing all along by manually changing one to a
transfer category, specifying the other account, deleting the other
account's downloaded entry, and marking the transaction as recogniciled.

I can already submit the transfers through my bank's website and then
download them into Microsoft Money later. It seems that MSN Bill Pay does
nothing beyond this same thing. So, why would I pay extra for it? It would
be worth it to me if all of the transactions would show up in the register
before they are downloaded from the bank's website so I would not enter
everything in manually in both places.

In addition to this, every single time I attempted to login to MSN Bill Pay
from the links embedded inside Microsoft Money, it prompted me to first
enter my old password and then change it to a new password. Why on earth
would I want to change my password each and every time I log in? It won't
allow me to keep the same password I had. I can't remember a new password
every time I click between screens in the program! That's insane!

The way they have this setup is total crap in my opinion. I'm just going to
cancel the trial and use the service the bank provides for free. Besides,
the bank doesn't have a limit to the number of transactions that can be
performed. Unfortunately I still have to key the data in both in the website
and in Microsoft Money seperately which is highly annoying, but if I can't
get any further than that with MSN Bill Pay I guess I don't have any other
option.

-Jeff

I see. So in other words, you can't pay bills directly from Money.
You need to sign up with MSN first. I think I'll stick to my Bank's
bill pay for now.

I have used the MSN Bill Pay for several years now and I have had absolutely
NO problems with it at all. I enter my transaction in Money and then just
click on send transactions and it connects to MSN Bill Pay and sends the
transaction. I only enter my information into Money. No place else. I've
not had any missed payments ever!

In order to get into the MSN Bill Pay site you first need a Passport id.
Then you have to setup a security key (another password) to get into the
Bill Pay site itself. If you want to setup to integrate with MS Money then
you have to setup a second security key. This seems like a pain but it only
needs to be done once. The passport gets you into MSN itself, the first
security key is for use when you go to Bill Pay in your browser. The second
key is only used from Money, it tells MSN Bill Pay that this is an
authorized electronic connection.

Normally when connecting from Money all I need to enter is the second
security key. I don't even need to enter my passport id from Money to use
Bill Pay. Only if I go there in my browser do I need to enter my passport
then the first key.

It really works very well for me.

Kevin Campbell

"Jeff P" <jeffpNO[at]SPAMruralramp.net> wrote in message
news:11dbp50gh18fm66[at]corp.supernews.com...
- quote -

I have used the MSN Bill Pay for several years now and I have had absolutely
NO problems with it at all. I enter my transaction in Money and then just
click on send transactions and it connects to MSN Bill Pay and sends the
transaction. I only enter my information into Money. No place else. I've
not had any missed payments ever!

In order to get into the MSN Bill Pay site you first need a Passport id.
Then you have to setup a security key (another password) to get into the
Bill Pay site itself. If you want to setup to integrate with MS Money then
you have to setup a second security key. This seems like a pain but it only
needs to be done once. The passport gets you into MSN itself, the first
security key is for use when you go to Bill Pay in your browser. The second
key is only used from Money, it tells MSN Bill Pay that this is an
authorized electronic connection.

Normally when connecting from Money all I need to enter is the second
security key. I don't even need to enter my passport id from Money to use
Bill Pay. Only if I go there in my browser do I need to enter my passport
then the first key.

It really works very well for me.

Kevin Campbell

"Jeff P" <jeffpNO[at]SPAMruralramp.net> wrote in message
news:11dbp50gh18fm66[at]corp.supernews.com...
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"Jeff P" <jeffpNO[at]SPAMruralramp.net> wrote in message
news:11dbp50gh18fm66[at]corp.supernews.com...
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My gosh, I'm trying the free trial of MSN Bill Pay and this thing sucks big
time!! It keeps demanding that I create a new password every time I login.
There for some reason are two different passwords that I keep having to
switch between. It won't let me keep it the same. Once I'm logged into it,
it still fails to syncronize the information with Microsoft Money, so I
still have to enter all the payees and payments twice.

Does it suck this bad for everybody else or is it just me?!

-Jeff

My bank offers online bill payment through their website. However, doing it
through the website requires that I first enter it online and then waste
time duplicating the same information in my Microsoft Money file.

I'm wondering... Is it worth the $2.95 per month to get MSN Bill Pay? Is it
more fully integrated with the program? I hate having to go out to the
bank's site to fuss with this stuff only to then redundantly key it all in
again.

-Jeff