problems downloading from Citibank

janet maker

The following problem occurs most months with my two Citibank accounts but not any other accounts. The example today was with the Citi checking account which was reconciled through June 30. I got the July statement and downloaded my transactions, but it also put numerous duplicate transactions for prior months in my account. I found them going back to May. I removed all I found, but there was a discrepancy of $445.45 that I could not find. It must have occurred before July 1, because it changed the opening balance. I have sometimes used the option of downloading from the Citi website instead of Quicken, because I can specify a start date for the downloads. Despite that, it downloads duplicates prior to the start date anyway. Does anyone know how to fix this?

Rocket J Squirrel

janet maker said:

I have sometimes used the option of downloading from the Citi website instead of Quicken, because I can specify a start date for the downloads. Despite that, it downloads duplicates prior to the start date anyway. Does anyone know how to fix this?

I believe the duplicates occur because you are downloading two different ways.

Each downloaded transaction has a unique identifier so that if Quicken sees it a second time, it ignores it instead of creating a duplicate. The two download methods generate different formats of the transaction identifiers, so Quicken does not recognize duplicates as such.

As far as the start date not obeying your specification, that would seem to be an issue on the Citi side and you'd have to follow up with their online banking technical staff.

Sherlock

I suggest you compare the running balance of the account register in the current Quicken file with the running balance of the account register from a Quicken file backup saved when the account was last reconciled.  One way to accomplish this is to print the registers to text files.

Different connection methods may produce a different FITID field value for the same downloaded transaction.  Generally, this results in a one-time duplicate set of downloaded transactions.

Chris_QPW

I believe in the case of Citibank you are guaranteed to get duplicates when you switch between Express Web Connect and Web Connect (downloading a QFX file).

In the case of Express Web Connect it is the Intuit servers that are generating the Downloaded ID/FITID.  If I'm correct about that you would find Intuit- at the start of the Downloaded ID (you can turn on this column to check).  In the case of Web Connect it would be Citibank generating them and as such would be different.

There is a possibility for them to be the same because the "agreed upon download format" between Intuit and Citibank/Express Web Connect could be the QFX/OFX format and as such Citibank would be generating it, but if it is in another format like CSV there isn't any chance for them to be the same.