Why do Chase transactions have spelling errors?

davidpmax

I have Quicken downloading my transactions from my Chase checking account, and I see the Payee field often has spelling errors. Some examples are "Ch Ase Cardmember Services", "To Ca Pital One", and "To Ba Nk of America". Is that the way Chase sends them? It makes it hard to search.

davidpmax

I tried downloading the QFX file directly from Chase, and now I think I see what's going on. Look at this:
...
<NAME>Online Payment ########### To Ba
<MEMO>nk of America
...
It looks like they are limiting the name field to 32 characters and then the overflow goes to the memo field.

splasher

How is the account setup for download, Direct Connect or Express Web Connect?

Find this info on the Account List (Tools menu).

Answer that question and we can point you in the correct direction.

Rich_M

@davidpmax Unless you have renaming rules for these, that's the way the bank sent them.

If they're coming from the bank like that you can create renaming rules to get the description you prefer.

You can confirm if that's the way they were sent by reviewing your online log file.

Chris_QPW

You can turn on the Downloaded Payee column to see what Quicken recieved.

davidpmax

> @splasher said:
> How is the account setup for download, Direct Connect or Express Web Connect?Find this info on the Account List (Tools menu).Answer that question and we can point you in the correct direction.

Connection type is "Quicken Connect"

Chris_QPW

Oh you are using Quicken Mac, but you posted this labeling it Quicken Windows that is why the answers are for Windows.  But you should be able to look in the logs or turn on a column in the register that shows what was sent to Quicken.  But a Mac user will have to come in and give any details.

davidpmax

I tried downloading the QFX file directly from Chase, and now I think I see what's going on. Look at this:
...
<NAME>Online Payment ########### To Ba
<MEMO>nk of America
...
It looks like they are limiting the name field to 32 characters and then the overflow goes to the memo field.

Rich_M

@Chris_QPW I have found in the Windows version, that many of my downloaded payee descriptions get overlaid by the renaming rule description, but not always, so I go to the log to be sure.

Have they corrected this bug in the subscription version?

Chris_QPW

@davidpmax Yes that looks like you found the problem.

@Rich_M I think I have seen people report that problem, and in the subscription version too, so I guess that it is still happening.   It certainly shouldn't work that way.

I don't think I have ever seen it in my accounts, but most of mine are Direct Connect and that might affect it.

Rich_M

@Chris_QPW Is there a limit to how many characters can be placed in the payee field of the QFX, do they really need to split it like that?

Chris_QPW

Yes there is a limit in the OFX standard.  32 characters for the payee, and 255 for the memo.  Now how they are doing it seems quite wrong to me.  There is no need for "Online Payment" to be at the start.  It is the very fact that they are putting next to useless information at the beginning that messes things up.

Rich_M

@Chris_QPW I think the problem is that this long description is what the customer sees when they login to the Chase website.

They don't want to  support alternate abbreviated descriptions for Quicken downloads, so they just apply this quick and dirty solution.

davidpmax

I'm on Quicken Premier 2020 subscription.

The payment is recording a transaction that I made from Chase using their online "Pay bills" function. It always shows up in the checking account transactions as "Online Payment <transaction id> To <payee name> MM/DD".

This, by the way, has always bothered me because the payee name is the name that goes on the check, which is often something generic like "Card Services" or "Citi Cards", and since I have more than one card from the same bank, it makes it impossible to tell which is which from the transaction name. I'm usually cross-referencing with payments recorded from the credit card. The Chase payment activity online has the friendly account name, but it's not downloadable, and it only goes back 6 months.

If Chase is going to go to the trouble to have the feature of downloading QFX files, and allowing Quicken to connect and download transactions, couldn't there be a little bit of friendly coordination to make the data as useful as possible? Anything we users can do to encourage it.

splasher

davidpmax said:

…

If Chase is going to go to the trouble to have the feature of downloading QFX files, and allowing Quicken to connect and download transactions, couldn't there be a little bit of friendly coordination to make the data as useful as possible? Anything we users can do to encourage it.

Why?  Chase would like you to ONLY use their apps and their website.  They really don't want to make it easy for you to move your accounts to their competitors.  They want you to be dependent on Chase.

Rich_M

@davidpmax I have always entered my transactions manually first, then used OSU to match them, catch discrepancies and reconcile my accounts.

I think most people waste a lot of time cleaning up their transactions, when they just download everything from the bank, due to the way payee and memo descriptions are transmitted.

This is a common problem with all the banks, not just Chase.

Chris_QPW

Rich_M said:

@Chris_QPW I think the problem is that this long description is what the customer sees when they login to the Chase website.

They don't want to  support alternate abbreviated descriptions for Quicken downloads, so they just apply this quick and dirty solution.

True, but even there on their website "Online Payment" isn't the most important piece of the information, they could just add it to the end.  I'm just stating that I think it is a poor choice on their part.

davidpmax

> @splasher said:
> (Quote)
> Why?  Chase would like you to ONLY use their apps and their website.  They really don't want to make it easy for you to move your accounts to their competitors.  They want you to be dependent on Chase.

I am dependent on Chase, but they don't keep historical transactions forever in a searchable way. If they interoperated better than their competitors with Quicken, it should be a selling point for them. Plus, if I could search all my recent transactions better in Quicken than I could online, it would put less load on their web site.

Anyway, I was a quicken user back when Quicken came on floppy disks, and I was printing paper checks on my dot matrix printer. I upgraded through Quicken 2000, and then tried making do with online banking. I'm coming back because I need that longer record and the ability to cross-reference between credit card statements bank transactions.

I'm just shocked that 25 years later, or whatever, there are still basic issues like this.

Rich_M

@Chris_QPW Don't forget, they're not crafting their descriptions for Quicken downloads, they're crafting them for Chase customers, for clarity, so they can be as verbose as their system allows.

You have to look at it from their perspective, even if you think the description is poor, they don't.

Chris_QPW

davidpmax said:

I'm just shocked that 25 years later, or whatever, there are still basic issues like this.

I'm more shocked that they haven't purposely cutoff all Quicken support.

First of you have an industry that refuses to set a standard for such operations.  OFX/Direct connect as such an attempt by the big players at the time.  It only was adopted by about 4000 financial institutions out of more than 35,000, and has since dropped down to about 2000 financial institutions.

When it was created online banking had very basic features.

These days the features that the financial institutions provide have gotten pretty good, and they are used by most of their customers.  Quicken users on the other hand are a drop in the bucket for them.  So it is interesting that they consider it a good investment to keep this support going, especially after they have spent so much to bring their own services up.

Quicken Connect/Express Web Connect is the attempt to connect into those websites and try to preserve the ability.  It isn't really going that well in my opinion, but I don't think that it is even still around because of the financial institutions wanting to cater to such a small customer base.  The same kind of "aggregation" is being used to allow Chase to display transactions for Bank of America and such.

And back what Splasher said about changing financial institutions.  I also can't see how the financial institutions would consider that a good think.

If I'm banking with Bank of America, and I decide that I like Chase better, with Quicken I can change and all of my history is still there.  But if you do the same thing just using the financial institution's offerings, as soon as you close your Bank of America account(s) the history is gone.  That is a big incentive to people that want to keep track of their financial history not to change.

Of course it now that I think of it that is a two way street.  The financial institution that will get your business would certainly like that.  So I guess it is sort of a wash.

Rich_M

@davidpmax I've been using Quicken for decades also and think it has some great features, which is why I keep using it.

However, I think it has a shrinking user base, especially with the advent of the IoT and the quality of their recent software, from what I can see from this community.

I'm still using Quicken 2017 Premier, because my primary download with Citi was failing 90% of the time, for the first 4 months of this year.

It was posted as an ongoing problem with no ETA for a resolution and no explanation, throughout that time.

So I just let my online services lapse and started doing everything manually.

I now spend a fraction of the time maintaining my accounts and no longer have to waste time researching these online issues.

I also don't want to upgrade to the subscription version, because they seem to be breaking many fundamental features that are working perfectly in my version that I depend on.

Chris_QPW

Rich_M said:

@Chris_QPW Don't forget, they're not crafting their descriptions for Quicken downloads, they're crafting them for Chase customers, for clarity, so they can be as verbose as their system allows.

You have to look at it from their perspective, even if you think the description is poor, they don't.

Their customers are also on mobile devices which have limited screen space. It just seems to mean that you put your important information first. Clearly it is the financial institution that is adding this extra information and he can add it as easily to the back as it can to the front. And as a consumer not Quicken user what I want to know is the payee not that it was an online payment. Like I said it's just my opinion but that is the way I think about it.