Missing Transactions from Fidelity Investments

BillFoss

I use One Step update to download transactions from Fidelity. Occasionally some of the transactions are missed. This only occurs occasionally and later transactions are successfully downloaded.

I catch the problem when I reconcile Quicken to the printed Fidelity statement and the share balance for some of the funds are different. For example, the August Fidelity Statement shows the account position as of August 31. In Quicken I open the Fidelity account, choose to view holdings, and set the "as of" date to 8/31, and then compare the share balances. I then review the list of transactions in Fidelity, mind the missing ones, and manually post them to Quicken.

This doesn't happen every month. In looking for patterns, it appears that it only affects reinvestment transactions which occur at the end of the month. It does not affect every month. The most recent occurrence was on 8/31 where 3 out of 4 dividend reinvestment transactions were lost. Four reinvestment and capital gains transactions were successfully downloaded on 9/3.

As background information, I am an up-to-date Quicken subscriber running on Windows 10. I use one-step-update many times a month, typically in the late evening after share prices on mutual funds have been updated for the day.

I'm pretty sure that there is a disconnect between Quicken and Fidelity. What is the process for submitting bug reports to Quicken? What information can I supply? I have a process for detecting and correcting Quicken. The problem is that it is time consuming and annoying.

BK

Hi @BillFoss

To test my understanding, are you saying that the reinvestment transactions will eventually download properly, just that sporadically there are few days of lag in between?

If my understanding is correct, I suggest that this is not necessarily a Quicken issue (pending further investigation), rather that of the Financial Institution (FI) in updating the data file they generate for downloading to 3rd parties like Quicken.

Here is a typical example for one of my brokers:  When they issue a reinvested dividend, (a) the download data contains two transactions of Deposit + Shares Bought and (b) these two transactions are few days apart in dates (we can argue why they do this but that is a different discussion).  So depending on my timing of performing an update or One Step Update (OSU) in Quicken, I may either receive both, or sometimes only one of the two (the Deposit) first and the other one (the Buy) a few days later.  And once all done, I manually delete the Deposit and change the Buy to ReinvDiv – and I do this every month.  I know this because I can look into the download file from the FI to see what it actually contains and what is missing.  So the timing is the key which is perhaps why you are seeing it sporadically.  If this is the case, there is nothing Quicken can (nor should) do anything about it; rather give us exactly that the FI is supplying and leave it to us to edit if needed.

RE: What is the process for submitting bug reports to Quicken?  You can do so directly from the Help menu in Quicken with options of Contact Quicken Support and Report a problem.

Sherlock

The process for reporting a problem to Quicken is to select Help > Reporting a problem...
If you would like to contact Quicken Support, review https://www.quicken.com/support/quicken-support-options

That said, the issue you've described doesn't sound like a Quicken issue to me.  When we use the Direct Connect connection method, the financial institution is entirely responsible for the data available for import.  I would check the OFX log for the missing transactions:  select Help > Log files  

A posted workaround for this issue appears to be to deactivate the Online Services of each account and, when you subsequently setup the Online Services, the missing transactions should appear: https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7893192/fidelity-investments-reinvestment-transactions-not-downloaded

BillFoss

To: BK: I do not believe that missing transactions will eventually be downloaded. In the most recent example, transactions from 8/31 had not been downloaded by 9/9. Meanwhile transactions from 9/3 had been downloaded. Missing transactions from 7/30 have not been download yet otherwise I would be out of balance because the manually entered transactions would not be backed out.

In my case, I do get two transactions: A Dividend received and a Reinvestment. They both occur on the same day. When it works, Quicken is smart enough to combine the two into a single "ReinvDiv" transaction.

Thank you for the problem reporting link. I have filled out the form.

To Sherlock: Thank you also for pointing out the report a problem menu choice.

A agree with you that the problem is probably not with the Quicken Desktop software. Rather it involves a middleman process which facilitates the data transfer from Fidelity to the desktop. Somebody has written specifications for how the process works but then either Fidelity has not properly implemented the "Send" side of the specification or Quicken has not properly implemented the "Receive" side of the specification. It is also possible that the specification is flawed such that data can be lost. I do not know whether the bug is in the specification itself or is in the Send or Receive logic.

The Deactivate/Reactivate workaround does seem to work which means that this part of the Specification along with the associated Send and Receive implementations are flawless. If the existing implementation cannot be fixed, perhaps Quicken can automate all the steps in the Deactivate/Reactivate workaround so that it is invisible to the user.

Chris_QPW

BillFoss said:

A agree with you that the problem is probably not with the Quicken Desktop software. Rather it involves a middleman process which facilitates the data transfer from Fidelity to the desktop. 

There isn't a middle man (at least not between Quicken and the financial institution).  That is in fact why they call it Direct Connect.

Direct Connect is in fact the OFX specification which a standardized protocol (QFX is a slightly modified version of OFX).  The "Send" part of the OFX log is what Quicken sent to Fidelity.  And the RECV part is what it returned.  By looking at that log one can clearly see if this is a Quicken or a financial institution problem.

Note though there is sort of a "middle man" on the financial institution side.
This communication is carried out by Quicken contacting a "OFX server" at the financial institution.
Clearly that isn't where the actual transactions are created/saved at the financial institution.  So when the request comes in the OFX server's "backend" would have to make a request to get the data from their database and create the correct responses in the OFX format/protocol.

The OFX protocol can be found here:
https://www.ofx.net/downloads.html

BillFoss

Thank you for pointing out www.ofx.net. It provided an interesting description of the process. I've decided that diagnosing this is beyond my skill set.

I have determined that Quicken Desktop did not receive the dividend reinvested transaction. This is based on searching OFX.log for a transaction for purchasing the number of shares received for the reinvestment and not finding one. I did find a transaction for the shares purchased on a later, slightly different reinvestment transaction that was properly posted to Quicken.

Regarding sending transactions through "middle men": I have accounts through Fidelity and Wells Fargo. I examined the communications that quicken performed during a One Step Update session using Wireshark. All transactions appeared to go through ofx3.financialtrans.com. If Quicken were directly accessing Fidelity or Wells Fargo, I would have expected the server to be those companies. Since the data was encrypted, I could not see exactly what was happening, but it appears that financialtrans.com is somehow involved in managing the process.

This is definitely something way to convoluted for a call to the Fidelity help desk. I definitely need some help from Quicken.