CITI Bank CC downloads duplicate transactions

gsdtoy

Mac OS Catalina & Quicken Deluxe 2020 15.16.1
I download transactions by manually connecting to financial institutions (Web Connect) and then import to Q. I have the column FITID enabled. CITI Bank credit card transactions come in as random duplicates: not all transactions are duplicates nor can I correlate it to specific merchants or manner of payment. For some purchases, the card was inserted; others were paid with Apple Wallet, yet others were telephone transactions.
Some of the FITID numbers are also duplicates although the merchants and the amounts differ.
I have tried using Direct Connect. This changes the FITID format to something that has an INTUIT prefix but does not eliminate the duplication.
Where do I begin to resolve this?
Thank you!

Allen101

I download using Direct Connect. Today, all of my CITI cards download duplicate transactions. 196 in one account and 30 in another.

Quicken_Natalie

Hello @gsdtoy & @Allen101,

Thank you for taking the time to visit the Community and post your issue, although I'm sorry to hear that you're experiencing duplicate transactions when downloading from Citi in Quicken. 

If you have not already, I suggest restoring from a backup file created before the issue began to occur.

https://www.quicken.com/support/how-backup-or-restore-your-quicken-data

You may also consider contacting Support directly for more advanced assistance, as they have the tools and resources necessary to best assist in finding a solution.

https://www.quicken.com/support#contact-support

Thank you,

Quicken Natalie

lhossus

Re: Duplicate transactions, and FITIDs with INTUIT prefix.

There seems to have been a change to the servers that supply transaction downloads for Citi credit cards. Windows users have an extended discussion at https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7877383/citi-cards-direct-connect-is-now-broken  But note that that discussion in intermixed with a prior Windows-only problem, so it may not be easy to understand.

My personal experience:
Saturday morning the 27th my Direct Connect downloads failed with "Download Error (15500) / The user cannot sign on because the user ID or password is invalid."

I tried all the shortcuts Quicken offered me to reset my connection: a) I clicked on the Setup button in the Account Status window. Failed with same error; b) I clicked on the Change Connection Type in the Settings window for the account: Failed with same error; c) Selected "Try a different Financial Institution". Failed with same error; d) Clicked on Troubleshoot > Deactivate in Accounts > Settings followed by Edit Settings > Set up transaction download. Failed with same error.

Finally I gave in: Having already Deactivated the Citi account, I clicked on Accounts > New, selected Citi Cards as the bank and Options > Direct Connect as the type of connection, then linked the account at Citi to my account in Quicken, and it worked.

I say it worked: The download duplicated the last 90 days worth of transactions for my Citi card. The FITID for each was now prefixed with INTUIT where as in the existing transactions FITIDs are all simple 13-digit strings.

I deleted all these duplicates with the INTUIT prefix on the FITID.

I personally am waiting now to see how downloading performs going forward. I am hoping that my Saturday experience was a one-off event.

My summary on all this:
A new system was brought online to serve downloads, replacing the one that had been in use. The new system did not recognize existing Quicken clients and so it responded with the "... user ID or password is invalid" error. 

After deactivate / reactivate, the new server served up transactions with a fresh series of FITIDs (it did not have access to the old series) - hence the apparent duplicates.

But now that everything has been initialized I am hopeful that downloads will resume their clockwork-like reliability. PS: About every 1 to 2 months there is a hiccup in this reliability, but those problems are generally resolved with a retry.

Chris_QPW

lhossus said:

Re: Duplicate transactions, and FITIDs with INTUIT prefix.

After deactivate / reactivate, the new server served up transactions with a fresh series of FITIDs (it did not have access to the old series) - hence the apparent duplicates.

Just so people know.

The transactions that have a FITID that starts with INTUIT those were downloaded using Quicken Connect.

Before recent problems with Direct Connect/Citi Cards when you used Citi Cards as the financial institution you always got Direct Connect.  That isn't true at the moment, it is now defaulting to Quicken Connect.  That is the reason for the duplicate transactions.  The FITID have changed because you have changed from Direct Connect to Quicken Connect.

Whether the default will remain Quicken Connect after this problem with Direct Connect is fixed, no one knows yet.

lhossus

Chris_QPW said:

...

The transactions that have a FITID that starts with INTUIT those were downloaded using Quicken Connect.

Before recent problems with Direct Connect/Citi Cards when you used Citi Cards as the financial institution you always got Direct Connect.  That isn't true at the moment, it is now defaulting to Quicken Connect.  That is the reason for the duplicate transactions.  The FITID have changed because you have changed from Direct Connect to Quicken Connect.
...

Thanks Chris_QPW.

You are SO right: I did unwittingly change from Direct Connect to Quicken Connect. Worse yet, I did it twice on two separate data files!

Not my intention: I slipped up after all the experimentation. And not having any other Quicken Connect (QC) accounts with the INTUIT prefix on the FITID I did not recognize the significance. (I do have several QC accounts where the INTUIT prefix does not appear).

I tried again: still cannot connect via Direct Connect.

Chris_QPW

lhossus said:

 (I do have several QC accounts where the INTUIT prefix does not appear).

When you see INTUIT at the start of the FITIDs it is guaranteed to be Quicken Connect, but the opposite isn't true.

Over in Windows land Quicken Connect is called Express Web Connect.
In both Mac and Windows you also have Web Connect, which is the downloading of a QFX file and importing that.

And the "Express" was coined for Intuit creating a server process to login and get that QFX file and saving that data on their server, and then Quicken picking that up and doing the import.  So in that case the financial institution is generating the QFX file and as such the FITIDs.  But of course not all financial institutions generate a QFX file.  So Intuit gets an agreement to download the information in another format say CSV or XML.  It then converts it to QFX/OFX format.  And as such there usually isn't any unique Id in that data.  So Intuit generates one, and those are the ones that have INTUIT at the start.

BTW in a Direct Connect process Quicken sends a request for the transactions to the financial institution, and the "response" is the same as you will find in the QFX file.  That is what the QFX file is, just a text file copy of the "response" what would have been generated if the Direct Connect had been used.

gsdtoy

> @Chris_QPW said:
>
> The FITID have changed because you have changed from Direct Connect to > Quicken Connect.
>

Just for info: My download from CITI this morning was via Web Connect and all had the INTUIT prefix, which came as a surprise because that prefix had previously only shown up with Quicken Direct Connect.
I do not use Quicken Connect for any of my accounts.

Chris_QPW

@gsdtoy you have it backwards.

When using Quicken Connect and the financial institution doesn't provide Intuit with a QFX file Intuit has to generate the FITIDs.  When it does that it puts in the INTUIT prefix.

When you connect using Direct Connect it is the financial institution that is generating the FITIDs and as such they will not have the INTUIT prefix.

gsdtoy

Thanks Chris.
This situation with CITI is becoming intolerable. Q just downloaded a balance in excess of 3K when, in fact, I'm at just $500. The work involved in deleting dupes is making the convenience of using the CITI card . . . inconvenient. That, or Quicken is in major disarray. One or the other has to go!

Chris_QPW

For Citi Cards you should be aware of this recent change:
In the past just selecting Citi Cards as the financial institution got you Direct Connect.  That isn't true any more, see this FAQ:
https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7877583/faq-new-citi-cards-process-for-direct-connect#latest

Duplicate transactions are caused by the FITID not being unique.
That can happen in two cases.
The first is switch between the two connection types Direct Connect and Quicken Connect.

The other is when using Quicken Connect if you reset or deactivate/reactivate the account you will get duplicates because of the way Intuit generates the FITIDs.  It is using some kind of "seed number" that changes if you reset or deactivate/reactive your account.

In the case of Direct Connect it is the financial institution generating the FITIDs and as a rule they do a much better job because they base it on information in the transaction that never changes for that transaction.