Why do all my Banking accounts update when I select Update Selected Online Account?

wmduncan

If I wanted all to update, I would select Update All Online Accounts (which might include the Investing accounts as well).

jacobs

If you have accounts set up as Direct Connect, you have some control over what downloads when. All accounts at one financial institution will update together if you select to update any account at that institution.

If you have accounts set up as Quicken Connect, all your Quicken Connect accounts will update at one time.

I believe both of these are set up the way they are to reduce the number of times users need to connect to servers to download transactions. Quicken Connect is a service where a Quicken server logs in to each of your accounts during the overnight hours to pul down your latest transactions; they're held in that aggregation server until you connect from your Quicken -- and then everything it has gathered for you downloads in one dump. Direct Connect is where you are connecting on demand to the financial institution, but the protocol doesn't allow for selecting specific accounts you have at that financial institution.

jacobs

If you have accounts set up as Direct Connect, you have some control over what downloads when. All accounts at one financial institution will update together if you select to update any account at that institution.

If you have accounts set up as Quicken Connect, all your Quicken Connect accounts will update at one time.

I believe both of these are set up the way they are to reduce the number of times users need to connect to servers to download transactions. Quicken Connect is a service where a Quicken server logs in to each of your accounts during the overnight hours to pul down your latest transactions; they're held in that aggregation server until you connect from your Quicken -- and then everything it has gathered for you downloads in one dump. Direct Connect is where you are connecting on demand to the financial institution, but the protocol doesn't allow for selecting specific accounts you have at that financial institution.

Chris_QPW

One of the things that has always bothered me is that Quicken Inc and Intuit before them threw out an explanation of the process of downloading transactions for how the Intuit servers were getting transactions (non Direct Connect) which might have been true when it first was implemented, but clearly changed over the years.

Over the years there have been financial institution downloads that worked like they described, as in one login in a night to get the transactions.  But clearly that isn't the case for all as we have seen nearly real time with other financial institutions, not to mention all the new problems with multiple factor authentication.

Many years ago Quicken Mac went to a "new connection method", which is now called Quicken Connect.  For the longest time it has been stated that Quicken Connect (Mac) and Express Web Connect (Windows) are the same thing.

That isn't true, at least it wasn't true until very recently where they started changing Express Web Connect over to the same "connection method(QCS)".

The old Express Web Connect can be expressed as:
Quicken -> Intuit server -> financial institution

Quicken Connect/new Express Web Connect can be expressed as:
Quicken -> QCS -> Intuit server -> financial institution

And for good measure I'm going to throw in Quicken Web/Mobile syncing from the Desktop:
Quicken -> QCS -> Intuit server -> financial institution

Nope that isn't a typo, the last two are the same with only minor changes that I point out in this thread:
https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7882641/qcs-express-web-connect-is-cloud-sync

A quick summary is that they are the same sync, but with "Sync to Mobile/Web" on it has extra "settings" that tell Mobile/Web which accounts should be visible in those interfaces.  The "data" comes from the same Quicken Cloud account data set.

Now from experiences with talking to people that have to pay for every access to their account, I already know that QCS (what people would think of as Quicken Mobile/Web) accesses the financial institution's website multiple times a day.  How fast?  I don't know, but I do know that it is more than "once a day".

So you have QCS gathering data throughout the day and storing it in the Quicken Cloud account (this is on top of whatever the Intuit servers are caching)..

So when you go to request Quicken to "download transactions from XXX financial institution" it in fact has transactions from all of your Quicken Connect/Express Web Connect accounts stored there (maybe!).  And as such it would make perfect "programmer's optimization sense" to give you everything it has even if you only requested for one account.

The reason I said "maybe" is because we noticed a "caching behavior" in Quicken Windows with the new system.  The first time the request is made for the "day" "takes time".  But any request after that is extremely fast.  And so it might be that the user's first request of the day triggers it to go fetch the transactions, and then for "some period" just work from that cache.  Note that in fact QCS is going to all the financial institutions at the same time, so again from a "programmer's optimization sense" it just makes sense to go ahead and go to all the financial institutions that you have setup so that any other requests won't take additional time.

It should be noted that currently on the Windows side you can selected individual financial institutions and it will show that, but I suspect that it is doing the same thing in the background.  When QCS gets that request or based on some timing, it always tries to get all the financial institutions at the same time.  I don't think it picks and chooses.  It just makes it easier on it, one state "I'm updated" or "Not updated" for all the data.  BTW when switching to the new system on the Windows side they point out that the usernames and passwords are no longer being saved locally, "because they aren't needed and are stored in the Quicken Cloud account".

jacobs

To quote from "The King and I":

   In my head are many facts that, as a student, I have studied to procure;
   In my head are many facts of which I wish I was more certain I was sure.

   Is a puzzlement

   There are times I almost think nobody sure of what he absolutely know;
   Everybody find confusion in conclusion he concluded long ago.

   Is a puzzlement!

  

wmduncan

Wow. Those are some serious and prompt efforts to address my question. Nice.

I am content to live with some puzzlement together with an appreciation that connections and downloads seem to have gotten faster.

It's the multiple factor authentication that Chris_QPW mentions that makes it a bit harder to accomplish the downloads. To download from one institution I have to deal with a bunch of 6 digit codes that are coming at me in text messages from all the other institutions, too.

Which leads me to this request: Would the Quicken For Mac team please consider having the program pick up the incoming text messages with those codes like other apps do, showing a dialog box with the code and allowing me simply to click on it to complete the authentication?

Chris_QPW

Yes that is a nasty little problem. But there is no way that Quicken desktop can get those text messages it's not a phone I think you're thinking of applications that run on your phone. In fact the whole point of multi-factor authentication is proving that along with the username and password you are in possession of something else in this case your phone which Quicken desktop has no access to.

Given the problem it seems to me about the only solution would be if Quicken Mac and the sink to Quicken cloud was changed so that it only goes to one financial institution at a time.

Because what did seem like optimization is certainly going to cause a lot of problems in this case.