Downloads from Wells Fargo are misrepresented?

AnnaO

My Wells Fargo downloads are often registered as completely different transactions. Case in point, two ATM withdrawals. One registered as American Express payment, another as payment to a Citi card. What is up with that?

Quicken Francisco

Hello @AnnaO

Thank you for reaching out on the community and telling us about your issue. I do apologize for the issue you're having. I'm wondering here if this might be a side effect of the issues Wells Fargo is currently experiencing or if it's something unrelated. 

To start off here do you know what connection method you're using? You can check by right clicking on the account under the account bar and selecting edit/delete account. From there navigating across the popup to online services.  How long has this been happening? Is this the first time or is it a repeated action? Are any of your other accounts having similar issues? 

Once you get a chance let us know more details and we'll see what we can try to correct the error you're having.

Thanks,

Quicken Francisco

AnnaO

The connection type is Express Web Connect. I tried to upgrade to Direct Connect as prompted by Quicken, but got error messages each time. The issue persists and may be related to One Step Update. Today it downloaded Amex, but not Chase, Citi or Wells Fargo. I had to do each bank separately. I feel like the quality of Quicken has been going down since the transition to subscription service. Those freaquent updates do more harm than good.

UKR

AnnaO said:

My Wells Fargo downloads are often registered as completely different transactions. Case in point, two ATM withdrawals. One registered as American Express payment, another as payment to a Citi card. What is up with that?

The first place I'd look at when downloaded transactions get "misrepresented" to some unrelated Payee Name would be the Renaming Rules.

Transaction download problems with matching and adding new transactions correctly

First please ensure that all optional settings in Quicken pertaining to recall, memorization, automatic categorization and renaming of payee names are enabled. You find those settings in Edit / Preferences / Data Entry & Quickfill and Downloaded Transactions. Additional settings can be found for the detection and processing of transfer transactions in Edit / Preferences / Transfer detection.

Are you automatically accepting downloaded transactions into your registers?

If you are relying on Quicken to "automagically" fill your account registers from downloaded transactions, you may run into problems. Despite all efforts by the Quicken programmers, the "Autopilot" (that's my name for the part of the Quicken program which processes downloaded transactions and converts them into new register transactions) is not infallible. For that process to work 100% of the time one would need a crystal ball because the information downloaded from the banks often is just too terse and cryptic.

You should, at least for a while, turn off the "automatically accept downloaded transactions into registers" setting to gain better control over what is downloaded and what to do with it. Review each downloaded transaction, make changes if necessary (e.g., to get a payee name = "Starbucks" instead of "POS TRANS 070119 STARBU", "POS TRANS 070219 STARBU", "POS TRANS 070319 STARBU" or to assign a category) before you click to accept each transaction.

Any changes you make to downloaded Payee Names are remembered in Renaming Rules.

Any other changes you make (add/change Category or Memo text) are remembered in the Memorized Payee List.

Next time the same transaction for this Payee comes along, Quicken should remember and give you a better new register transaction.

 

In case you have issues with transfer transactions not being generated correctly:

For best results manually enter transfer transactions into your register BEFORE you download transactions from the bank which contain the transfer confirmations. For recurring transfers use scheduled reminders and enter them a day or two before the due date. Be sure to use distinct Payee Names for each transfer / credit card payment to avoid confusing Quicken - memorized payee entries.
That takes the guesswork out of the Autopilot's process. Because a correctly entered transfer transaction already exists in your account registers, the Autopilot should just match the downloaded transfer transaction to the existing one in both accounts.

 

Where are the "Auto-accept downloaded transaction" settings?

There are two places where this is controlled in Quicken for Windows:
 - Globally, for all accounts, in Edit / Preferences / Downloaded Transactions
 - For each account individually, the global setting can be overridden from the Edit Account Details screen, Online Services Tab. Look for blue text "Automatic Entry is: ON / OFF". Click the text to change the setting.

AnnaO

No offense, but this long list of generic instructions here do not change the fact that the features which used to work flawlessly are now failing left and right. I’ve been using Quicken for over a decade and it’s worse now that it has ever been.
1. One step download only partially downloads, some banks still have to be updated manually, and all this requires double checking what Quicken has done, because often there is no error message on the skipped banks
2. Even when it downloads, there is no guarantee that all transactions came through. Quite often I can see a transaction on the bank’s website but Quicken had not downloaded it.
3. Some transactions get renamed randomly, like in my above example where two consecutive ATM transactions from Wells came through on the Wells account register as payments from two different non-Wells banks.
None of this used to be frequent problems. You need to fix the bugs in the program