I'm REALLY sick and tired of Quicken Cloud not being available from my Quicken for Mac

mlimanni

I'm REALLY sick and tired of Quicken Cloud not being available from my Quicken for Mac, when I can come here and log into Quicken Web on the same machine and get my transactions from financial institutions just fine. When are you guys going to fix this. It's been doing this consistently for 80% of the times I try for the last year. Get this figured out, please!

jacobs

@mlimanni  first, you should be aware that the site is basically a user-to-user forum; you aren't speaking directly to Quicken management here.

Next, without more information, it's hard for anyone here to offer advice. Could you explain how you are attempting to access Quicken Cloud from your computer? Are you using the web interface to Quicken Cloud? Or are you referring to trying to download transactions from quicken Cloud inside Quicken? When you try, what error message or result do you get?

You also might want to consider contacting Quicken Support by phone. Their representatives have the option to screen-share your Quicken to see what problem you are encountering, and capture any log file that might be necessary if they cannot resolve the problem. Quicken Support phone lines are open from 8 am-8 pm Eastern time, Monday-Friday.

mlimanni

@jacobs Thank you. I am aware, but I am also aware they sometimes look...

To answer your questions: It is the latter that I am trying to do - download transactions / update accounts from within Quicken for Mac. The error says: "Quicken Cloud is not available" and it says it's usually due to a maintenance event, etc. If I open the "Account Status" window, it says "There may be something wrong with your internet connection", which of course, there is not because I can use other cloud apps just fine and can actually log in to Quicken Web and sync transactions there without incident. I have high-speed internet service of 150-200Mbps as I work from home, so it should not be a bandwidth issue. I have no problem with cloud-based apps for work either.

I have opened a support ticket on this before and support was of no help. The issue resolved on its own a couple of days later and I was able to once again download transactions. This very rarely happened in the past, but for the last year or so, it happens more often than not. I thought I recognized a pattern where it was more prevalent on the weekends when more folks might be interacting with the service, but it's happening during the week now as well. I've been a user of the Intuit family of products since the 80's and this is incredibly frustrating.

mlimanni

@jacobs ^

(didn't seem to take your tag above)

jacobs

Yes, the "internet connection" message is something they should change, as it's not a good description of whatever connectivity problem Quicken is experiencing. 

The connectivity problems have definitely gotten worse over the past year, as many financial institutions apparently block Quicken at certain times to lighten the load on their servers. I saw a post from a Quicken moderator this week that routinely mentioned that "On Mondays Amex blocks aggregation to their servers", causing Quicken users to get connectivity errors. Others do it on the weekends, or during busy weekday hours; some did it for multiple days around the time of the various stimulus payments hitting banks over the past year. If you've seen the release note parted by the Quicken Mac product manager about the new 6.2 release, you'd see his comments about them being engaged in a year-long process to re-engineer the way they connect to many financial institutions in order to meet upgraded bank security requirements and reduce the number of disruptions. (Clearly, Quicken management does know that connectivity problems are Quicken's weakest point, and they have some large-scale plan to try to improve it; the details of what is being changed, and when users should see a better experience has not yet been explained.)

That said, unfortunately I can't answer why you're having such severe problems. 80% connectivity failure certainly doesn't match what other users routinely report. My only suggestion is to take another crack at Quicken Support to see if you get a more helpful/responsive support agent. (Like any company, some support representatives are just better than others.) Sorry I can't be of more help.

mlimanni

@jacobs This is a great response. Thank you. I have seen some articles about what banks are doing, but this is a much fuller perspective. One of the things that is so frustrating with this issue is that it may last for days, then it works just fine. This is not just happening for 1 or 2 institutions, but the message pops up immediately and prevents any accounts from updating. If I open the Account Status window and try to update any of the institutions, it fails, each in turn as I try one at a time. I will try again with support. Thanks gain.