• You change your mailing address for your bills to PayTrust’s secure processing address
• You can add your expected bills to PayTrust, or just wait for them to start telling you they received bills.
• If you haven’t pre-configured your bill to arrive at PayTrust, they will alert you of an unanticpated bill, and you can go in and setup a biller for the bill.
• If the bill is expected, they email you who the bill is from, how much it is, and when its due.
• You can pay the bill via PayTrust (direct debit from your bank account) or via another mechanism (I use Quicken‘s Bill Pay integration with Bank of America).
• If you want to see the bill, you can login to PayTrust and via your bill online. You can even download a PDF of the bill.

So far this has worked pretty well. I haven’t had any issues, and I haven’t lost any bills (that I know of).

What would I change?

• Its a bit disappointing that even though Intuit owns PayTrust and Quicken, there’s not any integration between them. I would love to see my PayTrust bills show up in Quicken and I could just pay them from my Quicken interface.
• The direct debit to make a payment gets taken out ~5 business days prior to when you want it to arrive at the biller. Bank of America doesn’t charge me till the date I want it to arrive there – even though they probably did send the money earlier. Bank of America treats it more like writing a check: it’s not really “arrived” until the other party has actually received the payment.
• The quality of the scan is somewhat poor. At home I was scanning ~600 dpi, it looks like the scans PayTrust makes are around 75-100 dpi. Its generally legible, but c’mon, space is cheap!

PayTrust Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Technorati Tags: Bill Pay, PayTrust, Quicken

Intuit (via Quicken) is the leader of personal finance software. There’s just no disputing that statement. I spent time evaluating other solutions, and nothing even came close to Quicken. There’s a reason Intuit rules every category they’re in: they know what features customers want. (Full disclosure: I currently work for Intuit, but it has nothing to do with what I’m writing, as you’ll see this is not a review of Quicken)

Anyways, I’ve been running Quicken on Windows XP in a VMWare environment since I migrated to Ubuntu Linux. Last I had looked, Quicken 2007 (which is the version I use) was not compatible with wine (a Windows Emulator for Linux). However, I was reading a Linux magazine last night and saw that Quicken 2007 was now supported via Crossover Linux. I looked up Quicken 2007 support on the Codeweavers page this morning, and lo-and-behold someone gave it Silver rating! There were a few known issues, but everything had a workaround, so I decided to give it a try.

I first tried Wine on its own, but it was clear that wasn’t going to work. Whatever hacks (Tips & Tricks) the Codeweavers guys had figured out wasn’t going to work on Wine alone. I installed the trial of Crossover Linux and followed the convoluted instructions to get Quicken running. And it works!!  (See my updated instructions to get Quicken running here)

I don’t need Windows anymore at all! So screw you even more, Micro$oft!

• Pros
  • I like that all the functionality is available online, anywhere you have access to a Flash 9 plugin.
  • It seems to be very well connected to banks, all of my banks and credit cards were easily found and it started getting transactions without any fuss.
  • I like the drag & drop of transactions to categories mvelopes.
  • Mobile access? Good idea!
• Cons
  • Though they claim to import Quicken data, they actually don’t. I tried to upload my file and it said the file was too large. I’ve been using Quicken for 5 years. My .QIF file is ~2MB. That’s not a very big file these days when Google gives away 3GB of space.
  • Even if I could’ve uploaded the file, it says the data won’t be used because Mvelopes “works differently”. You know how many categories I already want to use to track expenses??
  • Categorization is only two deep. So I can’t have ‘Pets – Medical – <Pet Name>’ as a hierarchy. Instead I have to create ‘Pets’, then ‘Cali – Medical’, ‘Toby – Medical’, ‘Jade – Medical’, ‘Sammy – Medical’, ‘Leo – Medical’.
  • Roll up expenses isn’t very easy, intuitive, or possible as far as I can tell.
  • No capability to keep track of your stock portfolio, stock options, or ESPP.
  • Any transfers, or payments, that end up with two actual transactions leave me with two transactions that I have no idea what to do with. I can’t classify the payment as a transfer to the credit card account, and I can’t classify the payment on my card as a payment from the bank. I wish I could explain this.
  • Can’t use Mvelopes to track tax data to import to TurboTax.
  • Can’t track assets, like our house.

Look, overall, Mvelopes it’s probably OK for the first time budgeter. But after using Quicken for so long, I can’t go back to this kind of basic functionality. I’m within my 30 day trial period, so I’ll be canceling my account. Oh, it sucks that you have to call to cancel your account – it’s an online application! Where’s the online account maintenance?

• Why I gotta ditch Windows:
  • The only reason I’ve been able to keep up with Windows is MSDN. I haven’t bought a Windows license, ever, except with a PC.
  • I’m certainly not going to upgrade to Vista (which is a different story on its own).
  • Windows is slow and bloated. A fresh install of XP seems to run OK, but with any service packs and patches, performance turns to sludge.
  • Microsoft (and vendors) have made Windows XP x64 a PITA as a desktop OS. Printer drivers, scanner drivers, everything is missing or incompatible.

• Why (I think) Linux is the way to go
  • I’ve been running my websites on LAMP (Linux, Apache, mySql, PHP) for over a year now, using only open-source software, and I love it.
    • (As a side note, at this point I’ve easily donated more to the software I use than I’ve actually spent buying software in more than 10 years.
  • No licensing fees, no crap-tacular activation “features”.
  • Most of the Linux distros have spent a lot of time on their UI and driver support to make sure Linux can be used a desktop OS.
  • I can still run Windows in a VM if I need particular Windows functions or applications.
  • I’m a geek – and geeks use Linux.

My biggest issue with this transition has been my extensive use of Quicken for the past five years. I’ve explored a few possibilities, which I will be blogging more about as I try, learn, and evaluate over the next few days, weeks, and months:

• KMyMoney – Free, open source, money management software for Linux.
• GNUCash – Free, open source, money management software for Linux.
• Mvelopes – Online budget management software (requires Flash 9)
• MoneyDance - Commercial money management software for Linux, Windows, and <ugh!> Mac.

Due to my experience with Quicken, the following applications were deemed not good enough for me, for various reasons:

• jGnash – Free software, no bank integration (QIF import only)
• Buddi – Free software, no bank integration (QIF import only)
• Yodlee! – Online bank & bill aggregator. Doesn’t help me budget and predict income & outflows.

I’d love to hear anyone else’s suggestions of what I can use to replace Quicken.

For now I’ve settled on Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy) 32-bit. I can run 64 bit with my CPU, but there are a few things that don’t seem to work well, like the Flash plugin for Firefox.

Enough for now. I’ll publish more when I have more to say.