USAA duplicate transactions

deriter

When downloading USAA credit card transactions, I get transactions that are duplicates of the last download I did along with the new transactions. I have to manually delete them before accepting the new transactions into the register. Is there a fix for this?

Frankx

Hi @deriter,

The problem you are seeing is one that a large number of Quicken users (Windows and Mac users) also have been experiencing for several weeks now.  It started when USAA made changes to how users connect to it and has continued for some users.  This appears to be a USAA problem.  Here's a recent message thread LINK that has more information - including a request for users to send a "Report a problem" submission.

Frankx

Frankx

Hi @deriter,

The problem you are seeing is one that a large number of Quicken users (Windows and Mac users) also have been experiencing for several weeks now.  It started when USAA made changes to how users connect to it and has continued for some users.  This appears to be a USAA problem.  Here's a recent message thread LINK that has more information - including a request for users to send a "Report a problem" submission.

Frankx

kingjck

Just got off the phone with USAA Technical Support. Representative agreed it was an ongoing USAA problem that has existed for several weeks. Said there was no purpose in submitting a ticket. He said they were working day and night to fix it. It is astonishing that USAA can't seem to fix this problem. Either the software engineers working on it are inept or they really aren't working on it.

Chris_QPW

kingjck said:

Just got off the phone with USAA Technical Support. Representative agreed it was an ongoing USAA problem that has existed for several weeks. Said there was no purpose in submitting a ticket. He said they were working day and night to fix it. It is astonishing that USAA can't seem to fix this problem. Either the software engineers working on it are inept or they really aren't working on it.

Sometimes problems that look simple from the outside are very complex on the inside.

deriter

Computers are machines that process data. Programmers write the code that tells the computers how to process that data. If it takes several weeks for programmers to write the code to fix this one issue, imagine what would happen if they had to fix a big problem or, God forbid, make a major change. Can you imagine if USAA just went offline for several weeks while they worked through how to fix a problem? They would be out of business.

Chris_QPW

@deriter some of the hardest problems I have had to solve start with someone saying "It should be easy to...."

And I have spent weeks on a given problem that ended up being a two line code change.  Not that writing two lines of code take any time at all.  But before that can happen you have find the problem, then fixing it might depend on other things outside of your control to be changed, not to mention you try one way and it sort of works, but not 100% so you try another, and another.  And financial institutions don't like to change code "on the fly" because as you suggested they can't be down for weeks at a time.  That means even once the problem is found and fixed they might take a long time to verify that it doesn't cause any other problems before rolling it out to the public.

Without seeing exactly what they are dealing with you are making a pretty big assumption that they are incompetent.

In truth though this statement by the support person "He said they were working day and night to fix it." is most likely just trying to put a good spin on it.  By their own website they are working on putting out a whole new security system, which is looks like Quicken is only a very small part of.  And as such I'm sure that these problems for the downloading into Quicken isn't the only problems they are working on.  And in fact I suspect that Quicken has pretty low priority in the scheme of things.  Quicken user like to believe that they are a major force with all the financial institutions, when most likely they are a drop in the bucket in comparison to the general user population.

Bill Zakowski

Does anyone have an update on this? I switched to Quicken from Moneydance because of USAA issues and now it seems even Quicken is having issues with USAA.

Patiently (not so much) waiting

Chris_QPW

@Bill Zakowski I read most every thread that mentions USAA and I don't see any recent updates other than people saying they are contacting USAA at some level.

I haven't seen any change in the problems for quite sometime.
When they first switched over there were even more problems, and they fixed a few, but after that initial surge of fixes, I haven't seen any progress.

Clearly USAA is aware of the problems.  And given that some of the contacts that people have made is to the office of the CEO I don't think you can get any "higher".

I like USAA as a financial institution, their website, their app, and I like where they are going with the new security, but if your focus is Quicken (or any personal finance program it seems), you have just assume that isn't a real high priority with them.  Which is a real shame since USAA has been one of the best in this regard in the past.

Personally I'm a lot less affected than I think some people are.
I only have a checking and savings account with them.  My credit card is with Chase (with cash back rewards), so in fact I have a low volume of transactions with them, and what's more it seems that they have fixed the duplicate transactions on the checking and savings accounts, but not on the credit card.  They have seemed to fix the downloading all the transactions as a "transfer type".  The check number still comes down as zero though.

I think one reason that the credit card accounts and the duplicates are lagging is because in fact it might be a "different process".  In the past the credit card accounts were being downloaded with Express Web Connect (which frankly wasn't that reliable at USAA) and now it seems that they have gone to Direct Connect. Which in the long run is probably better, but it seems that they haven't worked out how to avoid sending the pending transactions.  Note the way they do that in the checking and savings accounts is to just delay the sending of transactions to where Quicken can pick them up (the OFX server) till late at night.

And I don't use sync to Mobile/Web, which is broken, and think it is for the same reason.  It uses Express Web Connect and USAA wants to get rid of that flow.  At least that is the feeling I get from all of this.

Craigstr

I too have this duplicate transaction issue on my USAA credit card. Multiple calls to USAA tech support and multiple calls to the Office of the CEO only to get the "company line" every time. My credit card is the 2.5% cash back card which they offered me several years ago. I don't think it available any more. I get a lot of cash back as I run all my transitions through the card. Seems like USAA may be trying to make me (us) leave. Do others have the 2.5% card? Just curious if others that don't have the 2.5% card have the issue too.

Michael Dulaney

Turn on the FITID (Financial Institution Transaction Identifier)display option in your USAA VISA card register and you'll see the problem. My best guess is that They have a pair of mirror servers responding to download requests. The servers seem to be configured slightly differently. One server is assigning a FITID using alphanumeric characters and another is assigning a FITID using hexadecimal characters. Quicken uses the FITID to determine if a transaction has already been downloaded. Connect to one server you get one flavor FITID, connect to the other and it sees already downloaded transactions as discreet and downloads duplicates. How to get them to fix it is problematic.

Bill Zakowski

Quicken, when will this be fixed. I am still getting duplicate transaction from my USAA credit card?
thank you

SGK

April 11 - Still ongoing I had 2 duplicate entries this morning and a couple more almost daily this last week. It has gone on for months. The balance was off $5600 this morning that I had to track down where the errors were on your part. USAA and Quicken you both need to find the fix on this. You are wasting people's time daily trying who end up manually reconciling accounts because of the duplicate entries. You are both being paid for and providing services that are defective.

kingjck

I concur. This has been going on for much too long. I do work around the problem by downloading daily and deleting duplicates that have already cleared from my download list. Have to be careful and it is most annoying. I have used quicken for close to 20 years. Suddenly I have a defective product. Now it seems I have to go through the agony of migrating to a new product and learning it.

kingjck

I concur. This has been going on for much too long. I do work around the problem by downloading daily and deleting duplicates that have already cleared from my download list. Have to be careful and it is most annoying. I have used quicken for close to 20 years. Suddenly I have a defective product. Now it seems I have to go through the agony of migrating to a new product and learning it.

Chris_QPW

kingjck said:

I concur. This has been going on for much too long. I do work around the problem by downloading daily and deleting duplicates that have already cleared from my download list. Have to be careful and it is most annoying. I have used quicken for close to 20 years. Suddenly I have a defective product. Now it seems I have to go through the agony of migrating to a new product and learning it.

You don't have a "defective product" you have a defective financial institution.

USAA is sending those duplicate transactions with different unique Ids.  Quicken can't just make up what it should ignore based on what appears to be the same transaction to you.  By changing the Downloaded ID (turn on that column to see it) they are telling Quicken that it is a different transaction.  And in fact in way I believe it is, one is the pre-posting transaction that should never be sent to Quicken, and then the other is the "posted" transaction.

And as for Quicken finding a fix, the only thing they can do is what you can do, and that is ask USAA to fix it.  They can't force a financial institution to fix their problems.

Another choice you have is to use a different credit card.

kingjck

I have asked twice USAA to fix it. I talked to their IT department on the phone . Do you have a good address for CEO, email or postal?

Michael Dulaney

Wayne Peacock, Chief Executive Officer
USAA
9800 Fredericksburg Rd.
San Antonio, TX 78288

Good luck getting some kind of response. I wrote to him and then got a response in their "Messaging System" from a "Latoya J Williams" "Advocacy Advisor" who had been tasked with "researching what occurred" She listed her extension on USAA external numbers (46766) but she doesn't answer her phone and it goes to voice mail to which she doesn't respond. Worse still, she messages that she has made multiple attempts to call me on my cell phone which I left as my best contact number in her voice mail, which never logs any calls from her. I guess a letter to each individual Member of USAA's Board of Directors would be my next step. My best guess of USAA's executive suite is to stay out of jail and fixing the problem of a couple of hundred Quicken users is not on their horizon. Have you read the San Antonio Express-News article on their current problems. Here's a selection from the article about the appointment of a new President of USAA Federal Savings Bank.
"USAA has named a new president for USAA Federal Savings Bank, which has come under regulatory scrutiny over the last two years and hired a chief risk officer for the company."
"Vincent's promotion at USAA Bank comes on the heels of federal banking regulators slapping it with an $85 million fine in October after discovering the bank's internal controls and information technology systems didn't not comply with certain guidlines.
The Officer of the Comptroller of Currency found "violations of law" that were "part of a pattern of misconduct." That followed the bank receiving a failing grade from the OCC over evidence of "discriminatory or other illegal credit practices.
The fine related to a cease-and-desist order the OCC issued about two years ago against USAA Bank for "engaging in unsafe or unsound banking practices."

The former president of USAA bank left the bank to spend more time with his family.

Chris_QPW

@Michael Dulaney Interest article, especially about the "information technology systems didn't not comply with certain guidelines".

If you think about it, that is most likely at the core of the problems you now see with Quicken.  In other words the reason for all the Quicken problems is that the "move to a more secure system".  I'm sure you saw the announcements of that on their login page.  And from what I have heard that involved going to new servers. Whenever you do such a massive change over to new systems things are going to popup.  How fast they (or if) they get fixed is certainly going to be dependent on how important the company thinks they are.

And from what a long time user talking to an very knowledgeable USAA employee in the past told me, is when asked "What is the percentage of Quicken users?".  Answer "Less than 1%."

Personally I don't have a USAA credit card.  I have two Chase Unlimited Rewards cards that work very well and pay me cash back, and one Costco credit card, which also works fine.  So I never even bothered with the USAA one.  The USAA checking and savings accounts are now working "OK", but still getting 0 check numbers downloaded.  In fact these are low volume accounts for me since I pay for most things on the credit cards.  

kingjck

Thanks for your comments @Michael Dulaney and @Chris_QPW. I was not aware of the problems with USAA.  I only use credit card with the bank.  I don't have checking or savings there.  So I'll probably go to a new credit card.  Still do car insurance with them, but that is all.  I had similar response about multiple calls to my cell number (which did not occur).  Must be on top of their excuse list.  Anyway, at some point I guess I'll let them know about their failures.  But for now I'll move on.  Thanks again for your help.

Doug G.

@Chris_QPW and others - I too have been receiving the duplicate CC transactions from USAA for several months now. And I have to make sure I download frequently, so I can manually ID the duplicates and "delete" them, rather than "accept" them...a real pain in the ****! I added the transaction ID column to my register and verified that the duplicates are, in fact, coming in with different IDs than the originals...thus it's USAA's error (not a Quicken error).

But...I have NOT seen this as a problem involving PENDING transactions. Over the last several weeks, I have not seen one transaction come in during the download that had not already "posted" to my CC account. Yet I continue to receive duplicate transactions. I originally also thought the problem was related to pending transactions (because that made a little sense), but it isn't the case. Someone above mentioned that not only are the IDs different for the duplicates...but they are of a different format as well...possibly meaning that different servers may sometimes be being used by USAA, resulting in this problem. That sounds very plausible, so I want to check that out.

Haven't received much "help" from the USAA "Help" Desk when I've called. I hope when I call them next they will at least acknowledge there is a problem. The other 3 times I called, they simply acted as if this was news to them and opened a problem ticket (never to be heard from again).

Chris_QPW

@Doug G. it very possible that it isn't a "pending transaction" problem.  I don't have a USAA credit card, I only have a checking and savings account, so I personally can't check.  The main reason that was speculated is because when they first did this switch over, in the checking and savings accounts the duplicate transactions definitely were pending transactions.  USAA did fix that problem.  So the speculation was that it was the same problem in the credit card account, but it certainly can be a wrong assumption.

Joe25

Still active, I see and no fix in sight. I have to admit, since using Quicken in the mid 90's, I don't believe I've ever seen a download issue take so long to repair.

Chris_QPW

Joe25 said:

Still active, I see and no fix in sight. I have to admit, since using Quicken in the mid 90's, I don't believe I've ever seen a download issue take so long to repair.

As a long Quicken user, and a long time poster to Quicken forums, I have come to the concussion that Quicken Inc can do next to nothing to fix "financial institution connection problems".  If the connection type is Direct Connect, well that information comes directly from the financial institution and they have to fix it.  If the connection type is Express Web Connect, well that is provided by Intuit and the financial institution and they have workout a solution.

So in both cases Quicken Inc is mostly just a middle man that might be able to "bug" someone to get things fixed.

I do believe there are also "Quicken problems" especially with Express Web Connect which now is a sync from Quicken to QCS (Quicken Connection services) and then to Intuit and then the financial institution, but it is hard as user to determine when they are the ones causing problems.

Bill Zakowski

Quicken a status update please

kingjck

I have given up on a fix from USAA. BEEN A MEMBER AND CUSTOMER FOR OVER 58 YEARS. BUT THEY HAVE LOST MY BUSINESS THOUGH I DON'T THINK THEY CARE. HAVE ALREADY TAKEN STEPS TO ESTABLISH RELATIONSHIP WITH NEW BANK.

Doug G.

Just called USAA tech support again on this issue, and THIS time I connected with someone who was more familiar with the problem. He had actually spoken with the IT project manager in charge of the effort to resolve the duplicate credit card transactions. He was told the problem should be fixed by the end of this month (May). Time will tell, but this was the most encouraging discussion I've had so far with them.

SGK

today is June 8. There were 7 or 8 duplicate transactions from about 5 days ago. It is a real pain to track them down, then go to USAA and make sure they really are not double billing instead of USAA errors. I am cancelling the cards and banking account with them.

tresbowen

In my latest contact with customer support, I was told the problem would be fixed in July. We will see.....

kingjck

For what it is worth, I still have my USAA cards but use them very little. It prompted me to get a Chase Freedom Unlimited card which I am very happy with. Their benefits and customer service/support are great! USAA's loss is Chase's gain.

Joe Biggs

I have finally had it. I will be cancelling my USAA VISA card. I got a new 53rd Bank Preferred that gives 2% back on all purchases. I can't wait for them to fix this problem as I don't think they care and will never fix the problem

Chris_QPW

tresbowen said:

In my latest contact with customer support, I was told the problem would be fixed in July. We will see.....

I think I have seen posts for the last 3 months at least claim that it would be fixed by the end of the month.

kingjck said:

For what it is worth, I still have my USAA cards but use them very little. It prompted me to get a Chase Freedom Unlimited card which I am very happy with. Their benefits and customer service/support are great! USAA's loss is Chase's gain.

I actually have two of these cards since 2017, and have been very happy with them too.  And they play well with Direct Connect/Quicken.