Quickbooks and Quicken were both owned by Intuit until very recently. Also, they’re not really competitors since Quicken is for home use and Quickbooks is for running a business. There’s a very, very small amount of crossover, but it’s pretty limited to people running little tiny business (ie working from home, no employees, bringing in a few grand a year) and just need an extra hand keeping track of expenses.
I would guess the reason for not being able to pay through Quicken is that they’re two different products, they just happen to have similar names. Also, Quickbooks has spent the last 5+ years trying to get as much as they can online and creating a cloud based suite of products (suite? is that right?). In any case, it makes some amount of sense that in order for anyone to do anything in that cloud, you have to be logged into their cloud. I’m not sure if that makes sense, or even if it’s correct. But it’s my guess.
Of course, Intuit does a lot of things that make very little sense. So they may have just not been thinking far enough into the future to realize that a lot of businesses send bills to people that are just consumers or otherwise have no reason to own quickbooks or any other intuit product.
I know that it’s not all about me but a check is much easier for me since I don’t have to go to the ATM. There is no need to go to the bank anymore to deposit a check since I can just use my phone. If I am physically in a shop, I never write a check. I don’t even carry them with me. I always use a credit card. I totally get why a small business wouldn’t accept checks anymore and it wouldn’t annoy me at all if that was their policy.
I too am not seeing the danger here. I should be worried that if I write a check to someone, they might modify it in such a way that it can’t be cashed for several years? I say go for it.
(Of course I know that the check date doesn’t really mean anything and postdated checks can be deposited regardless of the date, which makes this urban legend even more pointless.)
Back in the day when I used to write cheques, the date line was always blank - I made a thing about always writing the month in full (January etc) rather and ‘/1’, but I doubt that anyone noticed.
The amount was alway there twice. Once in writing - Twenty five pounds and 35 pence, and the other (where it was presumably scanned) in a box as a number 25 - 50.
''A/C Payee Only" was pre-printed across the cheque but I have doubts as to whether it had any real validity.
These days most larger organisations offer a discount for paying by direct debit. Some charge extra for credit card payments and some refuse to accept cheques at all. A one-man business I deal with uses PayPal for electronic transactions but prefers cash.
When people talk about how obsolete paper checks are, they never mention how useful they were. You could write a check and get credit for payment knowing that it wouldn’t be cashed for several days at least. That was very important to me if my account was low in funds. I would get time to either deposit more money or expect that my paycheck would be deposited before the payee got around to depositing the check. You can’t do that with a debit card.
On the flip side: Our cleaning lady can send me a text when she’s leaving our house and have the money in her account when she reaches the shop.
In the dark ages that would take up to 3 “working” days, or I would have to remember to leave enough cash (the exact amount) on the kitchen table.
Back when I accepted checks, that was one of my pet peeves. Someone would write a check that would bounce. The person would often be pissed off because the check was “put through too fast”.
Many people would blame their bounced check on the bank. In one case that was correct! The guy brought a letter from his bank explaining that he deposited sufficient funds to cover the check, but the ATM was hit by lightning!
That’s definitely more than I average in the US, for personal (non business) checks, though I might write fewer checks than US average. Again I write checks sometimes strategically. If you pay your estimated income tax, income tax balance or property tax electronically you have to put it in by the due date and it will come out of your account immediately. If you mail a check it only has to be postmarked by the due date and IME at least 7-10 day lag before they deposit it, enough for the float to be worthwhile with interest checking account for larger amounts. Otherwise I write very few personal checks anymore. And even for taxes I now usually pay by credit card through one of the electronic online services. They charge a 1.87% ‘convenience fee’ for US federal but my CC pays 2.625% cash back, plus again I don’t actually have to make that payment out of my bank account to the CC company for almost a month.
But business is a different story, many though not all small business service providers to other small businesses want checks, and tenants send you checks if you rent apartments. As Joey P said, no way would a landlord accept credit card payment for rent and pay the fee. If it’s a free electronic debit type payment we’d be indifferent. If somebody wants to pay rent with Venmo, fine, but nobody has ever asked to.
It’s arguably logical that merchants take CC’s and pay the fees on the idea that customers will go elsewhere if they don’t, or even spend more because they are using ‘buy now, pay later’ CC. But nobody is going to turn down an apartment because they can’t pay the rent by CC, and once the rent is agreed everybody knows what’s going to be bought and paid for each month, unlike a store or flexible service provider where the customer might just buy that extra thing because they are paying with CC (do people really do that? most people think they don’t, I don’t think I do, but it seems actually many people do).
Sorry, I mistyped Quicken for Quickbooks. I was wondering why I can’t set up ebills and electronic payments through my bank’s online payment service with a vendor who issues invoices (and can receive payments) through Quickbooks. The only way to pay this vendor is (1) through my bank’s online bill pay, in which case they send a paper check directly to him or (2) logging into Quickbooks and making an ACH payment. Most larger vendors (electric, gas, cable) I can get a bill electronically in my bank’s system and submit a payment up to the day before the due date - or better yet have automatic payment set up so I don’t have to do anything.
I definitely make the vast majority of my payments electronically, but I still use checks regularly. Here are a few reasons:
For my son’s extracurricular activities at school, if I need to pay for anything then I need to write a check. They aren’t set up to accept electronic payments or credit cards at all.
My son’s piano teacher accepts payments in cash or check. Period.
Many small business service providers, e.g. plumbers, will give a small discount for paying by check instead of credit card. Some still won’t take credit cards at all.
Edit: I forgot the biggest reason of all: With a check, you can give someone money when all you know is their name, e.g. as a gift.
Off the top of my head, if you signed some agreement to pay X amount a month “from 1/1/20”, somebody could change it to “1/1/2019” and try to claim you owed them an extra year’s worth of payments. I doubt if they’d have much luck but I presume this is the sort of thing the warning had in mind.
Or if you signed a post-dated cheque for, say, six months’ time with “8 July 20”, someone could fill in “19” and cash it immediately.
Maybe a US/UK difference thing, but I don’t think “post dated checks/cheques” are a recognized thing in the US. Back when I accepted checks, occasionally someone would post-date a check. I did no billing, so the check was deposited when written and the bank never complained.
But how often are agreements like that handwritten? If you’re talking about a lease or a loan payment schedule or something like that, those are generally typed (or more likely printed, these days). A hand-written “19” added to the date would immediately stand out as fake.
It’s moot to me, since I’ve always used the full year when writing checks anyway, but this warning has struck me as somewhat dubious whenever I’ve seen it (invariably on Facebook).
And I believe kayaker is right. Post-dating a check does you no good at all. Banks will cash them at any time, even if the date is “in the future.” At least in the U.S.
It’s not a good practice to post-date a check, and a post-dated check can be cashed anyway, subject to bank policy. The Uniform Commercial Code allows a bank to process a check when presented even if it’s post-dated, subjecting the maker to bounced-check fees if the account doesn’t have sufficient funds.
