Schwab duplicate transactions work around

Wenham

Seems that there are a ton of problems with the new Schwab connection. I got my accounts (multiple accounts, two log-ins) to reconnect but the first sync resulted in 16 months of transactions re-downloading for every account. Scanning through them, there would have been many duplicates and a huge mess if I accepted all and deleting them individually would have taken forever.

I THINK the steps below have worked.

Found and restored a backup that was created before the new Schwab connection process, luckily only 10 days old.

Deactivated all the accounts.

Reactivated them - and this is the critical step - chose the simple version that does not download transactions. I synced a couple times and the accounts were updated but no transactions came into quicken. I think this step resets the connection to Schwab somehow.

Then I edited the account setup and set each one back to “complete”. After syncing I know I’m going to have some cleanup to do, but all that history was NOT re-downloaded. It looks like transactions since the backup was created have been downloaded right into the register (without requiring me to accept them), but I suspect I will have to add a few manually.

It will take a few days to confirm that everything is back working properly, but I’m hopeful.

Tech support also told me that are working on a patch that will limit the duplicate download to 3 months which is still going to be a colossal pain.

Chris_QPW

Interesting idea.  This may or may not work (completely), it will be interesting to see what happens over time.
Note that if you have new transactions that weren't in your Quicken register already, they might end up being missing and might have to be put in manually.

Here is the theory that goes with my statement above.

When you request "Simple" you are telling it to only add transactions to add/remove shares/cash amount based on the balances that it gets.  Note you might have some add/remove transactions to clean up after switching to "Complete" because of this.

(Below is how Direct Connect does the start dates, I believe Express Web Connect is similar, but no proof for that)

Now there is a difference between the first request and future requests.  The first request leaves the starting date for transactions up to the financial institution, which is typically 90 days, but can be different and in this case seems to as much history that Schwab has.

After that initial request Quicken provides the start date for what transactions it wants to get, which should limit what you get.

There may be some overlap in the start date that Quicken uses on purpose, just to make sure it gets all the transactions.  Quicken normally relies on the unique Id from each transaction to decide if it is new or not so this overlap usually doesn't produce duplicates.

But overall, I would say that at a minimum this process would cut download on a lot of duplicates in the investment accounts (there isn't such a feature in the non-investment accounts), but one needs to watch out for missing transactions.

Wenham

Definitely had some clean up to do. But once I double checked everything and did some manual entries for transactions that occurred between the back up and when I got the connection back up and running, everything seems to be back in order now. I can't believe there hasn't been more of a backlash on this. If I had accepted all those duplicate transactions it would have been a huge headache, and deleting them would have taken for ever as well. And that would have left me right where I was with this solution -- having to manually get it all back in sync.