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Fidelity Investments reinvestment transactions not downloaded

TomV

My wife and I have several different accounts with Fidelity Investments (4 IRAs and 1 Investment) that reinvest dividends monthly. For the last couple of months, One Step Update (OSU) has not downloaded those dividend reinvestment transactions although they show in the History section of each account on the Fidelity website. Manual entry of the transactions become somewhat onerous with multiple funds reinvesting dividends in each account.

This morning, 5/1/2021, after another OSU failure to download yesterday's reinvestment transactions, I discovered a workaround. If I deactivate each account then reactivate, the missing transactions download during the activation/connection process.

Non-reinvestment transactions during the month in the Investment account seem to download properly. It appears that the month-end dividend reinvestment transactions are the ones that OSU fails to download although I am not 100% confident that is true in all cases.

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Accepted answers

tgrantdavis

@TomV
I think you are having the same problem as I have had for about 9 years. I have studied it and carefully documented it. Maybe my findings will help you. Maybe Quicken and/or Fidelity will listen and fix it. I have reported to both of them, and tried, but so far, I have not been able to get either company to take responsibility.
Missing dividend and interest transactions almost exclusively occur on the last day (or last business day) of the month, and only if you download on that day. It can be a real pain to reconcile the accounts, but it helps to keep track of which securities and dates have problems. It takes me hours to check and fix nine accounts.
I have found a relatively easy way, though. You can usually find and fix the missing entries by backing up the start date. Go to Tools > Online Center. Hold Ctrl while clicking the Online Center menu. Select the account, press "Reset DTSTART", and put a date before the end of the last month. Repeat this for each Fidelity account. Run "One Step Update", and the missing transactions will appear.
Another way is to avoid doing updates on the last day of the month. Then, transactions will be there when you update on (or after) the first.
It appears that these end-of-month dividends get recorded late, and are post-dated. I once saw some discussion in the old forums about this kind of problem being fixed by Quicken for banking accounts, but not for brokerages. Interestingly, it rarely occurs for my eTrade account. I duplicated some problem securities there, but those dividend dates are a couple days before the end of the month, and they are okay.
Good luck to you. I am interested to hear if this helps you. I am planning to push back into Fidelity support on this issue one day.

All comments

Quicken Francisco

Hello @TomV

Thank you for reaching out on the community and telling us about your issue. I do apologize for the issue you're having. That is interesting. I'm wondering here if you might be able to fix the download by deactivating and trying to add like it's new. I'll leave steps down below on how to do so.

First thing I'll recommend is to save a backup to revert back to just in case. You can find how to do so down below.

https://www.quicken.com/support/how-backup-or-restore-your-quicken-data

Next we'll try deactivating all of the accounts. You can do so by following the article listed down below.

https://www.quicken.com/support/deactivate-online-banking-services-quicken-account

Once all the accounts are deactivated go ahead and follow the article here on reconnecting the accounts.

https://help.quicken.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=3216277

Once you've had a chance to try this see if you're able to get the transactions working properly. Let us know how it goes!

Thanks,

Quicken Francisco

TomV

Thank you for your reply. The process you recommend is exactly the process I mentioned in my original question and is the workaround I used to get the transactions downloaded.

The accounts rarely see transactions other than the monthly dividend reinvestments so it's unlikely that I'll get an opportunity before the first of next month to see whether or not the account deactivation/reactivation is a persistent solution.

Quicken Francisco

@TomV

Thanks for the update. I wasn't sure if you were reactivating using set up now button on the account after deactivating as it behaves a bit differently if you were to try setting it up as a new account. I'm wondering still what might be causing the issue. Since this account is direct connect it may be worth trying to see if we're able to contact FIdelity to see if they're able to find anything that might be causing the issue.

In any case if you're able to test to see if deactivating and setting up as new may have helped let us know.

Thanks,
Quicken Francisco

TomV

If the reactivation isn't a persistent solution and the problem recurs, I'll escalate the report to Quicken Support for them to work with Fidelity directly.

TomV

I can report that a simple dollar transfer between two accounts successfully downloaded this date. I don't recall any recent failures to download that type of transaction. I cannot test/verify failure to download reinvestment transactions until the end of the month when my mutual funds pay a dividend.

Again, thanks for your replies to my previous comments. I don't expect any replies ongoing and consider the problem resolved pending end of the month testing.

tgrantdavis

TomV

Thank you for your response, tgrantdavis.

The reported problem has not recurred during recent downloads of Fidelity account transactions, so I'm not sure when or how the problem was corrected or what I might be doing differently to avoid the problem.

However I do thank you for the DTSTART information. Since you brought the technique to my attention, I've used it to recover posted transactions that did not download in another problematic account, "Commerce Bank - MO, KS, IL". I wonder just how many of these apparently useful, undocumented tools are hidden in the software code.

tgrantdavis

Hello @TomV,
It is great that you are not having the problem now now. I wish I could get mine fixed. This has occurred for me for over 9 years, through many Quicken versions, and a couple computer updates. Can you please help me by comparing your conditions?

1) My operating system is now Windows 10. Are you on Windows, or Mac?
2) The most common missing transactions are for FIDELITY GOVERNMENT CASH RESERVES, in every account, almost every month. It is most likely that you have some interest credited in your accounts, usually on the last day. Do you?
3) Dividends are missed for other securities which are paid on the last day of the month. Most of these are quarterly. Do you have any of these ETFs, or others with dividends on the last day of the month?
SPDR S&P 500 TRUST

ISHARES CORE S&P TOTAL US STOCK MARKET ETF

ISHARES CORE S&P SMALL-CAP E
ISHARES RUSSELL 2000 ETF

ISHARES TR MRGSTR MD CP ETF

INVESCO ACTIVELY MANAGD ETF TR ACTIVE US REAL

BLACKROCK ENHANCED CAP & INCOME FD (CII)
INVESCO EXCHANGE TRADED FD TR HIG YLD EQ DIV
FIRST TRUST PREFERRED SECURITIES AND INCOME ETF

4) I download every day late in the evening -- after 9 PM Pacific time. Somewhere around that time is when new transactions are available. If I do not download in the evening, the transactions will appear the next day, and not be missed. If you do not download in the evening, can you please test doing that on the last day of this month?

TomV

Like the little girl in "Poltergeist" said, "They're Baaaack".

I held my response to your latest until after the first of the month to verify that the problem was, in fact, resolved. Seems it's not. Scheduled update this morning (Mar 1, 2022) did not download dividend deposits and reinvestments that were posted Feb 28. I used the DTSTART hack to download the transactions.

There was significant activity in all my accounts, brokerage and retirement, this past month with changes to MRD distribution schedules and bill payments; all of which downloaded appropriately. Whether or not that activity had any effect on the dividend posting download failures is unknown. It certainly should not have had an effect, but that's the only across the board difference with last month's account activity.

I am thoroughly confused, but, at this point, it seems we are both riding the same leaky rowboat.

tgrantdavis

Thanks for the update, though I am sorry that you (or I, or anyone) have to deal with this problem.

Is it possible that you updated on 2/28, but not on 1/31? What time of day? That could explain why January was okay.

I think that the last-evening-of-the-month update is key to creating the problem, and the reason why resetting DTSTART works. I go to bed early on Fridays, and if I make my last update before 9 PM on the last day of the month, the transactions are not missing the next day. It is not clear why this does not happen with dividends on other days. There must be some accounting system tasks at the end of the month. Maybe the postings are delayed and post-dated.

TomV

You may be on the right track with the "last-evening-of the month" hypothesis. My normal routine is to perform scheduled updates to every online account at 0800 every day as part of my paranoia about compromised credit cards. So at the end of last month, an update was run within a few minutes of 0800 on both 2/28 and 3/1.

The update this morning correctly downloaded the transactions associated with first of the month automated RMD withdrawals. Also, the security sales to support those withdrawals occurred a couple of business days before month's end and were also correctly downloaded during the appropriate daily update.

To follow up on this, I intend to remove Fidelity from the list of accounts that are updated daily and manually update Fidelity after the last day of March. If that works, it should be more convenient than having to individually reset DTSTART on each of 5 different Fidelity accounts each month.

tgrantdavis

Thanks for the update, @TomV.

Like you, I like to keep a close eye for unauthorized activity. I also like to watch my projected checking balance so as to not overdraw from automatic bill payments. I am in Pacific time zone, so my 9PM corresponds to midnight on the east coast. Most financial institutions work on Eastern (NY) time. I generally make my updates after 9P Pacific, because I noticed that most of the credit cards and brokerages historically have updated then. Over the past couple years there are some updates at other times, though. Even some Fidelity transactions appear at other times, but not these end-of-month ones.

What time zone are you in? I presume that your 8:00 is PM. If you are in Mountain time, maybe you were just before 8P on Jan 31, and just after 8P on Feb 28. A couple minutes is enough. That would be a perfect match to the theory.

On Feb 28, I tried another experiment. I ran (two-step) update well after 9P, entered the other new transactions, then I reset the DTSTART dates (on each of my 9 Fidelity accounts), and then updated again. No new transactions appeared that night. The next morning, I updated, reset, and updated, and 9 missing transactions appeared. I reconciled the balances from the Fidelity website, and all was well.

TomV

My time zone is Central and 0800 is 8:00am which would be 9:00am Eastern. I picked that time since an update at the start of business should be well after yesterday's transactions upload to online access.

It looks like the month-end dividend distributions are being posted to the Fidelity for online access with an effective date/time that fools the Quicken algorithm into thinking those transactions have already been downloaded or are somehow outside the download window.

tgrantdavis

Hello TomV,

From your results, I refined my hypothesis to try to fit all of our results. It seems clear that transactions are being dated earlier than when they are available. When we download between those date/times, then DTSTART gets set, and the transactions are subsequently thought to be already downloaded, so they end up missing. Maybe the transactions are being made available at 9AM Eastern, such that a few minutes either way makes a difference for you. If I postponed my evening update until just before 8AM Eastern, then they should still be missing. That turned out not to be the case this month.

I made this test now at the beginning of April. Here are the results...
1) 20220331 13:23:16 - Ran OSU and accepted all transactions. Notice how the log file has local time with no indication of offset from GMT.
2) Avoided OSU in the evening when I usually run it.
3) 20220401 05:21:14 - Got up early to run OSU before 9AM Eastern time, more like you. Lots of transactions downloaded, including from securities that are usually missing. I accepted all transactions. Went back to sleep.
4) 20220401 11:48:24 - Ran OSU again. No new transactions.
5) 20220401 11:57:51 - After resetting DTSTART on all Fidelity accounts, I ran OSU again. No new transactions.
6) I then went to the Fidelity website, got the current cash balances, and successfully reconciled all of the accounts. That confirmed that nothing is missing.

So, the missing transactions were available at 8:21AM Eastern this month. That doesn't explain your results, unless Fidelity schedule is more variable. How did you do this month?

Maybe next month, I will try delaying OSU until after midnight Pacific (3AM Eastern). Would you like to guess if they will then be available or missing? Maybe not available just after midnight, but not missing later?

Best regards,
Grant

TomV

Good morning, Grant:

First, my month end dividend transactions downloaded as they should. No problems, no hiccoughs.

Your hypothesis looks reasonable.

My downloads are scheduled for 9:00 am Eastern time but Quicken documentation says the scheduled OSU will execute within 15 minutes of the scheduled time (8:45 - 9:15 Eastern). If my OSU ran late yesterday it might set the DTSTART timestamp as late as 9:15. If Fidelity exposes a transaction today predated to yesterday at 9:00 am, my OSU will miss the transaction because it is looking for transactions since 9:15 yesterday. Under those conditions, a late OSU yesterday could cause a predated transaction to be missed by today's OSU. But, an early OSU yesterday would allow today's predated transaction to be downloaded by today's OSU. That could account for the transient, seemingly random effects I'm seeing.

Martin Brook

I have the same problem with Fidelity bond fund dividends that are paid on the last day of the month. Thanks everyone for the helpful workarounds but it would be nice if the root cause was fixed.

tgrantdavis

Yes, a fix would be nice.
I still have to take considerable time every month to work around these missing transactions.

tgrantdavis

This month (Jan 31, 2023), the Fidelity end-of-month items downloaded correctly. What I did differently was downloading both earlier and later that day. Usually, I run OSU around 9-10PM, as well as other times earlier in the day. This month, I ran OSU at 16:14 and 23:29 (Pacific).
I was surprised that the 4:14PM update did not block the downloads. This suggests that the data is available between 22:00 and 23:29, and that the false date/time in the transactions is between 16:16 and 21:00.
I think that this model is consistent with my previous results, but there is still some puzzle about TomV's morning update results. I will continue to experiment next month.
I hope that others can shed more light on this problem.