MAJOR DATA CORRUPTION with Quicken and Web Connect - WesBanco Bank

Chris Bogdon

I'm really frustrated at this point. WesBanco recently changed their back ends and we had to reconnect our accounts. I have connected my accounts but found out that Quicken will automatically add transactions to my register that were downloaded even though my automatic setting is turned off. After posting on this forum, I got many answers that this is how it works.

FINE! I think that is a crappy bug (or feature), but I will attempt to work around this.

Last night I reconnected my accounts one by one. What started out as a simple exercise turned into a disaster that required me to restore from the backup. The following are the issues that I found and I'm honestly disgusted with Quicken that this happens. Someone should look at this and determine that there is a major underlying issue that affects data.

1) Starting Balance of the accounts are changed - I was told that this is a known bug
2) Reconciled Transactions are modified - Both the Payee and the Categories. I have no idea why quicken thinks it is a decent idea to change categories and Payees on existing reconciled transactions. It happened across the board
3) Deposits that were made from Splits (ie., Paychecks) were removed and replaced with random categories. Yes, all my paychecks were removed and the Categories were changed.
4) Transactions were set to zero. Quicken actually removed values from existing transactions.

I have no idea why Quicken is so broken. There is no way an external download should ruin years of quicken data.

I wish someone from Development would reach out and find out why this is happening. It scares the hell out of me, that there is a bug this major under the covers of quicken.

Quicken Francisco

Hello @Chris Bogdon

Thank you for reaching out to the Community regarding your issue, although I am sorry to hear that you are experiencing issues with your WesBanco Bank accounts. I'd like to see if we might be able to troubleshoot some of the issues you're having but we'll need some more information first. When you refer to the known bug with balances what exactly is the bug? Are you using mobile sync or was it enabled at the time of this happening? 

The second thing here is what type of transactions are being modified. Is there a specific trend you're able to find such as a recurring payment or scheduled transactions/reminders? We also want to double-check your transfer settings. You can do so by going across the top to edit > preferences > transfer detection. Let us know what settings you have selected. Additionally, any trends you might also be able to find within the transfers as well will help.

Once you get the chance please let us know more about the issue you're having and we'll take a look to see what we're able to discover.

Thanks,

Quicken Francisco

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Chris_QPW

Chris Bogdon said:

As far as your questions, as far as Mobile Sync is concerned, it looks like it is turned on for certain accounts, however, not all the accounts I was having problems with.

As far as Transfer Detection is concerned, it looks like it is Checked for "Scan Downloaded transactions for possible transfers" and the Automatically create transfers is selected

It sounds like you have been hit by pretty much all the "mystery" bugs reported in recent times.

Below is my opinion.  I want to stated that it is just my opinion because every time these bugs come up I have never seen a definitive answer to fixing them.  I believe one of the main reasons this is, is because for the developers these are very hard to reproduce.  And that may be because of the same reason that the SuperUsers would have a hard time reproducing them.  Most of these problems seem to be related to Sync to Mobile/Web and with the exception of a data file for testing I don't believe there is a SuperUser that is using Sync to Mobile/Web, none of them trust it with their real data file.  When one doesn't use a feature regularly it is very hard to find the infrequent problems like this.

Now I'm going to go into some possible causes and such.  I'm going first address transfer detection.  This is nothing but a pure guess on Quicken's part.  What it is doing is after the downloading of transactions and accepting them into the register is done Quicken checks to see if there is a deposit in one account for the same amount as a withdraw in another that have been downloaded around the same date.  If so it guesses that this is a transfer.  Since this is a guess you should at least have the "Confirm possible transfers before entering in register" option on for Edit -> Preferences -> Transfer detection, and be careful that you answer correctly when asked about one.  Note this mostly comes up with automatic transaction entry mode since the transactions in both accounts will be first put into the register, and you are suppose to "review" them after that.  If one pre-enters the transfers and they are matched, or if using the Downloaded Transactions tab one sets the first side of the transfer's category to [Other account] then transfer detection won't kick in because this is a simple transaction match at that point.

You mention that you have Sync to Mobile/Web on for some accounts, but they aren't the ones messing up, so that you should be OK.  I don't think you can make that assumption.  Syncing involves more than transactions.  They sync categories and budgets and who knows what else.  I think once you turn it on you have to assume that it has full access to all parts of the program.  For instance one of the mentioned problems in some threads are corrupted Memorized Payee Lists.

I'm also going to mention a problem that as a long time user you might have tripped.
Each Quicken data file has a unique Id in it.  They use that unique Id connect it to the Quicken cloud dataset.  If you have do a copy using File Explorer or did any kind of copy (including backup and restore) using Quicken before they changed to the recent dialog like this (File -> Copy or Backup File) :


The copied data file has the same unique Id as the original data file.
Now say you take that copy and consider it a different data file, where you delete some accounts, and some more accounts and generally treat it as a different data file.

Well then you will have two different data files trying to sync to the same Quicken cloud dataset, which is certainly going to cause problems.  And note that turning off Sync to Mobile/Web isn't going to help.
Even with Sync to Mobile/Web off they still sync some information to the Quicken cloud dataset.

That is the main reason for the change above in how "copy" works.  It now changes that unique Id and for good measure it deactivates all the online services.  This copy is creating a data file that you really can use independently from the original.  Before this other than File -> New Quicken File, there wasn't any way to create a data file that didn't have the same unique Id and might run into "syncing problems".

BillOKeefe

I am seeing these symptoms as well. Account balances changes, lost paycheck entries - a complete mess. [Removed-Speculation]

Rob41

I am getting similar or identical problems with this week's connection method switch for my Schwab accounts. My details here: https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7901712/schwab-transition-problems-encountered/

Chris Bogdon, did you get anything figured out or resolved on this? Or did you, Quicken Francisco?

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BillOKeefe

I have made the same decision to manually enter / download transactions. So frustrating, and hard to nail down, since the errors seem to occur so randomly (and with increasing frequency). Has anyone found a reasonable alternative to Quicken? I looked at Personal Capital, but that is for tracking investments, not individual transactions.

Rob41

Just in case there is anything useful or encouraging in it, here is my post about how *I think* I got it straightened out with Schwab, in my case, to be able to not mess with the transactions already in my register. I'm not sure whether it's something I did (like turning off Cloud Sync) or something that either Quicken or Schwab straightened out, but I was able to switch over to the new connection method without harming my existing data today, finally.

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7902157/schwab-connection-method-switch-finally-out-of-the-woods-maybe/