Missing transactions when downloading from Bank of the West and Fidelity Investments

Renee

As I was downloading transactions from accounts at numerous financial institutions I noticed that 2 of 5 accounts at BoW were not downloading correctly. There was a single missing transaction on the money market account, but the checking account was missing dozens. Fidelity was missing 3 transactions, only downloading the most recent one. During a support call the agent asked me to open a new Quicken file and add these two accounts. Both institutions created the accounts fine and downloaded transactions for the last 90 days without any problem. This apparently proved that the problem was not with the outside institutions but with the accounts inside Quicken. The agent wanted me to deactivate each account, remove them, then re-add them. I told her I wanted to look at other options so I hung up.

Recreating the Fidelity account is not a problem because it is new, but the accounts at BoW have 20 years worth of transactions that I do not want to lose. I restored from a backup and followed her suggestion for the Fidelity account and the problem seems to be fixed there. I then went to BoW and downloaded transactions manually for each account. I was able to get all the missing transactions. My balances all look fine. I made a backup. Then I tried to activate One Step Update for BoW, which is what I have used to update my accounts for many years. Apparently it worked and my accounts all showed a "Direct Connect" connection. However--two odd transactions downloaded from BoW. Both were future payments that I have queued up in Bill Pay at BoW, not within Quicken. Quicken would not let me delete the transactions. So I restored from the new backup, thereby losing my "Direct Connect." I am wondering if from now on I will have to manually download transactions for each individual account at BoW? I prefer this to losing 20 years of history, but it will be inconvenient.

The agent told me that the reason this started happening was that I have so much data in my file that it "glitched" and the only way to fix the "glitched" accounts was to remove them and re-add them. Can this be true? Surely there must be a better way to fix this problem without losing all that history? If I followed her suggestion I would only have 90 days of transactions in my register, because that is how many the bank would download. Isn't there a way to copy over transactions?

And why would the Fidelity account "glitch" since it was only created two months ago?

Can anyone tell me what actually happened and what is the best way to proceed?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Sherlock

Quicken determines whether a downloaded transaction should appear by checking if it has already imported the downloaded transaction's FITID for the register.  When we use the Direct Connect (and Web Connect) connection methods, the financial institution generates the FITID.  When we use the Express Web Connect method either Intuit or the financial institution may generate the FITID.  On some occasions, the algorithm used to generate the FITID changes and we may see duplicate transactions.  If the new algorithm generates a FITID that has previously been imported into the register, the transaction appears to be missing.  

This is one reason you should reconcile accounts.  Usually, the simplest solution is to manually enter the missing transactions.  When there are lots of missing transactions, you may find it more convenient to create a new register.

You may be able to confirm whether the transactions were actually downloaded by examining the OFX log: select Help > Log Files...

Renee

Thanks for your response but I was not able to determine anything from the log. I do reconcile my accounts every month. Can you explain what you mean by "when there are lots of missing transactions you may find it more convenient to create a new register"?

Sherlock

Renee said:

Thanks for your response but I was not able to determine anything from the log. I do reconcile my accounts every month. Can you explain what you mean by "when there are lots of missing transactions you may find it more convenient to create a new register"?

As Quicken prevents the import of duplicate FITIDs by register, a solution to importing the transactions again to use a different register:

To create a new temporary register to import previously imported transactions, you would deactivate the Online Services of the original register, create a new online register, accept the transactions, move/copy the transactions missing to the original register, delete the new register, and setup the Online Services for the original register.

To create a new register to replace the original register going forward, you would deactivate the Online Services of the original register, create a new offline register, move the transactions from the original register to the new register, reset any memorized payees and reminders, delete the original register, rename the new register, and setup the Online Services for the new register. 

Renee

Thank you again for your response. Am I correct in assuming that what you are referring to as a "register" is what the customer support agent referred to as an "account"? If so, what you describe makes a lot more sense to me: create a temporary account/register, download transactions and then move them to the original account/register, then delete the temporary one (with appropriate deactivate/activate actions). I could not imagine a scenario that would have me just delete all my transaction history or that a copy/move would not be possible. Which begs the question: why did the customer support person give me the advice she did????

I am going to try your suggestion and see what happens.

Sherlock

Renee said:

Thank you again for your response. Am I correct in assuming that what you are referring to as a "register" is what the customer support agent referred to as an "account"? If so, what you describe makes a lot more sense to me: create a temporary account/register, download transactions and then move them to the original account/register, then delete the temporary one (with appropriate deactivate/activate actions). I could not imagine a scenario that would have me just delete all my transaction history or that a copy/move would not be possible. Which begs the question: why did the customer support person give me the advice she did????

I am going to try your suggestion and see what happens.

I don't know what the customer support agent meant by account. 

Many of us use account, register, or account register interchangeably.  When we add an account to a Quicken file, we are creating a register.  Generally, the account exists at a financial institution and the register in the Quicken file is used to track the account at the financial institution.  For me, the use of the term register dates back to when I opened my first checking account and kept a register in the check book to track the account.

I don't know why the customer support agent gave you the advice she did. 

Renee

Thanks again for your input. The good news is that I was able to copy and paste transactions from my original register into a new register. The bad news is that it did not fix the problem, but in fact made it worse because it doubled all the transfers to and from other accounts in my file. What's more, attempting to download into the new register led to all sorts of weird behavior. So I restored from backup and will attempt to download transactions from my bank on the bank side from now on. Failing that, or if I have any other frustrations like this, I am going to migrate to another software package.

P.S. My suspicion is that this was caused by a recent Quicken update. Every time I contacted customer support they indicated they were having many many similar calls and tried to blame the issue on outside institutions (or in my case, a "glitch" caused by such a large account register, even though the same problem was in a relatively new register). I think there must be a problem with their latest update. Maybe they will look into it and fix it if they get enough complaints.