Gnucash Online Billpay

[Donald Allen]

On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 1:56 AM, David Reiser <dbreiser at earthlink.net> wrote:
>
>  On Mar 23, 2008, at 10:42 PM, Vince Radice wrote:
>
>  > Hi,
>  >       I am looking to replace Quicken with Gnucash.  In order to do this,
>  > I need to find out if Gnucash provides an on-line billpay feature.  I
>  > have looked through as much of the documentation including the Help
>  > file, but cannot find any reference to it.  I was able to activate
>  > the download from my bank.  So I know that part works.  I called my
>  > bank to see if I could get some help, but their response was that
>  > they only support Quicken and MS Money.
>  >
>  >       If this is not available, is it being worked on?  If it is being
>  > worked on, is it possible that I can help?  I am a retired programmer
>  > and have done some work in C, C++, and some of the Visual stuff from
>  > M$.  I have also looked into the structure of QFX and QIF files.  I
>  > wrote a program for myself that converts a QIF file to QFX.
>  >
>  > Thank you,
>  > Vince Radice
>
>  I don't think it is being worked on. The biggest problem is that there
>  are no publicly available OFX/QFX servers to test against. You would
>  end up testing the bill paying function against your own live account.
>  For data downloads, it isn't so bad if you screw up a patch to the
>  download code, but if you could trigger an unintended payment, life
>  gets more exciting.
>
>  Dave
>  --
>  David Reiser
>  dbreiser at earthlink.net

I've been doing electronic bill-paying directly from money-management
software since the early 90s, first with Managing Your Money on a Mac
(talking to Checkfree) and later with Quicken and uSoft Money. When I
considered converting to Gnucash, one of the things that made me
hesitate was the lack of this feature. But Gnucash made so much sense
to me, and Quicken and Money were in the process of collapsing of
their own bloated weight, so I went ahead, replacing direct bill-pay
with paying via my bank's website and just recording the transactions
manually in Gnucash (I could also import a qif file, but this hasn't
been worth the trouble, since I tend to pay my bills when I receive
them, thus each interaction with the website involves a very small
number of transactions). This turns out to be much less of a pain than
I thought it would be, since the Gnucash auto-completion works well. I
also make as much use of automatic bill-paying as possible (have the
payee pull the money from my checking account -- I do this with credit
cards, cable provider, Verizon, electric co.). The only gotcha that
I've found in this arrangement is that I've gotten distracted between
the time I submit the transaction on the website and record it in
Gnucash, and failed to do the latter. It's occurred once or twice in a
few years of using Gnucash, never with dire consequences. For me, the
lack of this feature has proved minor (to my surprise), and I'm much
happier with Gnucash than I was with the commercial offerings.

/Don


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