Quicken Windows Help

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Managing your bills using Quicken has advantages over managing your bills at the kitchen table. Quicken bill reminders help you plan your expenses and pay your bills on time. When you create a bill reminder, you enter the details of the bill and tell Quicken when to make the next payment, the amount due, and how often to make future payments. Do this for your income, too. Quicken will then have the information it needs to accurately project your account balances. 

When you add a bill, what you are really adding is a reminder to pay the bill. You also have the option of paying the bill using Quick Pay and Check Pay (Not available in Canada).

Finding the Bills & Income tab

The Bills & Income tab is located on the tabs bar across the screen. 

If you cannot see the Bills & Income tab go to View menu → Tabs to show and make sure it is selected.

How to pay a bill

  1. Add the bill to Quicken. 

  2. Enter the bill payment when it's due.

    When the bill payment is due, Quicken follows your instructions and either reminds you to enter a record of the payment in the register or transaction list or automatically enters the record of the payment for you.

    If you enter the record of the payment yourself, you can verify or change the way you want to make the payment. You have two options:

    • Make the payment online. Select this option when you want to create one-time online payments or repeating online payments. If you're creating one-time online payments, you still need to send the payment, as described in step 3 below. Before you can make online payments from Quicken, you must activate an account to send online payments or sign up for Quicken Bill Pay.
    • Make the payment manually. Select this option when you want to pay in cash or write a check (Cheque in Canada) to mail.

  3. Send the bill payment.

    Regardless of whether you enter the record of the payment in Quicken yourself or you have Quicken automatically enter it for you, you still need to send the payment.

    • If you're making this payment online, you need to send the payment to your financial institution for processing. The one exception is if you've set up this payment as a repeating online payment, in which case the payment will be sent at the specified time without any additional intervention.
    • If you're making this payment manually, you need to pay in cash or mail the check (Cheque in Canada).

Notes

What if the payment amount varies?

When you add a bill reminder to Quicken to remind you when a payment is due, you can enter an estimate for the payment amount. If you decide to pay another amount when the bill comes due, or if you want to make the payment from another account, you should edit the transaction before you enter it.

How should I pay my credit card bill?

If you're tracking your credit card only as a bill, then making the credit card payment is the same as paying any bill in Quicken (as described above). If you're tracking your credit card in an account, you can record the credit card payment as a transfer from your checking account to the credit card account. Information is available to help you decide how to track your credit cards.

Note for our Canadian Customers

The following terms will be different in the Canadian releases of Quicken.

Canada: "Cheque" / United States: "Check"
Canada: "Colour" / United States: "Color"
Canada: "Centre" / United States: "Center"
Canada: "Realise" / United States: "Realize"
Canada: "Behaviour" / United States: "Behavior"
Canada: "Analyse" / United States: "Analyze"


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