About Essential Bills

Essential Bills is the streamlined bill scheduling and payment setting that most users prefer. It offers all the tools you need to quickly and efficiently manage your bills. You don’t have to spend time tracking bill and account details, so it’s easy to pay both your recurring and regular bills.

To use all of the features listed below, plus more sophisticated tools for tracking and managing more detailed bills, deposits, and transfers, switch to the Advanced Bills setting. To learn more, see the related topics below.

With Essential Bills you can:

  • Edit and pay multiple bills at one time. When you select multiple bills to pay, you can edit their payment information and submit them all at once, instead of submitting bills individually.
  • Keep track of all your bills. Microsoft Money Plus Deluxe keeps track of every bill you schedule, so you can see right away when they’re due and how they impact your account balance. View all of your scheduled bills in a list on the Bills summary page, or for the entire month on the bill calendar.
  • Work directly from the bill calendar. The graphical calendar view makes it easy to work with your bills and deposits for an entire month.
  • Set up recurring automatic payments (Apays). If you’re signed up for an online bill payment service with your bank, and this service includes automatic payments, you can have Money automatically pay bills according to a schedule you specify.
  • Categorize your bills to help with budgeting. It’s easy to make sure each bill is accounted for in your Money budget. You pick an appropriate category, like Utilities, and Money does the rest.
  • View a history of electronic and manual payments. Quickly confirm that any scheduled payment was made on time.
  • Split categories within a single payment. To make your Money budget even more accurate, specify exactly where every dollar is going.

Notes

  • To determine whether you’re using Essential or Advanced Bills, look for the Essential Bills or Advanced Bills label in the upper-right corner of the Bills summary page.

  • To learn more, see the Pay bills online video. To watch the Money videos, on the Help menu, point to Instructional Videos, and then click a title.
Related topics

About Advanced Bills

Switch between Essential Bills and Advanced Bills

About your bank’s online bill payment service

Microsoft Money arrowbluedown About Essential Bills

About Essential Bills