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Why does EWC seems to work sporadically

brooksrs@

I have 2 credit union accounts and 1 credit card account that use EWC for transaction download. I know there are new transactions in my accounts that haven't been downloaded. When I run the update, EWC will sometimes take a day or more before downloading the transactions. It seems like a hit or miss kind of thing. Please let me know if this is something I should expect or if it is an actual issue that needs to be investigated. Is there something EWC needs from the financial institution before it can trigger the download?

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splasher

Read this article on how EWC works. Connection Methods

Timing determines how quickly, 1 or 2 days, the transactions are available.

Why is it quirky? The data aggregator is quite often doing screen scraping, so any change in the website's formatting will cause a problem with collecting the information.

All comments

splasher

Read this article on how EWC works. Connection Methods

Timing determines how quickly, 1 or 2 days, the transactions are available.

Why is it quirky? The data aggregator is quite often doing screen scraping, so any change in the website's formatting will cause a problem with collecting the information.

brooksrs@

Thanks, so I will just be patient....

brooksrs@

More on this as my patience is wearing out. I can't get any of my EWC accounts transactions to download. I am going to be forced to go to the account website and send the down that way as I fall behind. Any suggestions.

UKR

brooksrs@ said:

More on this as my patience is wearing out. I can't get any of my EWC accounts transactions to download. I am going to be forced to go to the account website and send the down that way as I fall behind. Any suggestions.

You're probably not going to like my answer, but I've been doing it my way ever since I bought my first financial software for DOS, pre Quicken, in the early 90s, before downloading and before the Internet was invented: I use a combination of Scheduled Reminders and manual transaction entry to keep my books up-to-date. All my bank accounts are connected for downloading and I do daily downloads in the late afternoon, to confirm my handiwork. If it takes an extra day or two for a confirmation to arrive ... it's not so important. I know where my money is and I'm not falling behind.
If I may be so bold, I recommend you do the same, at least for a while, until bank processing delays, mail delivery delays, COVID 19 - related processing delays and what else causes processing problems simmer down.

brooksrs@

I have considered that as I have access to all of my accounts online as well. It's that I pay a subscription fee to Quicken to provide this service.
I have deactivated all 3 of my EWC accounts and then reactivated which for now seems to have fixed the problem. I'll guess we'll see.
Thanks

Chris_QPW

My approach is different from @UKR's and other SuperUsers that manually enter everything.
I tried that back in 1991 when my finances were much simpler and download wasn't available.
To me it was too much work, and quit using Quicken in 1992 and didn't start using it until 1996 when I could download. So to me manual entry is a no go, especially these days where I would find it less work just to go an use what the financial institutions provide.

My basic approach is avoid Express Web Connect. It is just to error prone, and it has gotten worse since they are trying to go to the new QCS connection method. Of the three accounts that I had that the only was to download was Express Web Connect that I had at the end of last year, I closed one, one I manually enter because it has a good interest rate and the only transactions in it are the interest each month, and if I do a transfer (which I enter as I do it). The last is a Macy's credit card that my wife won't let me close, but has less than one transaction a month in it. For it I have setup so that I'm using the older connection method called FDS and have been pretty good for the last few months, but sooner or later they are going to force everyone to QCS or as normal it will I'm sure it will get a glitch sooner or later. When either of those happen my wife is going to find herself entering those transactions of maybe we will just remove it from Quicken.

So for my "active" accounts they are all Direct Connect. It is getting harder and harder to find good financial institution's that support Direct Connect, but that is my basic requirement for my account downloading into Quicken.

Chris_QPW

P.S. There is one more thing I would like to say on the subject. With all this manual entry that the SuperUser do I get the feeling that they feel that they are making sure that the financial institution is doing the "right thing". And downloading is mainly to confirm this.

In my whole financial life (starting at about age 8) till now 54 years later I have seen only one transaction that I believe might have been wrong (very small and I'm not sure). This isn't talking about suspicious charges. I guess I have had maybe 6 to 12 of those. Over half the times the credit card company told me about it first. I the rest I found in download in Quicken, but could have done the same just looking at the credit card transactions online.

So bottom line is for me, I reconcile not to check that the financial institution is doing the right thing, I do it to make sure Quicken (and sometimes me) are doing the right thing.