CheckFree has offered on-line bill paying since 1988, and it handles bills for 250,000 customers who use Quicken, Meca Software LLC's Managing Your Money and other products. Yet fewer than 500 merchants can get CheckFree payments electronically. For 1.5 million others, CheckFree prints out checks accounting for nearly two-thirds of the two million transactions it handles each month.
Intuit launched a rival payment service for users of its Quicken software last fall, and the start has been rocky. On-line bulletin boards are rife with complaints about late payments from users, many of them former CheckFree customers who had been promised faster service.