Quicken & American Funds Download

qkn_kd

When connecting Quicken to my American Funds account it almost worked. On the American Funds website, transactional data is available going all the way back to the beginning of account startup. However, when quicken pulls the data in, it is very sporadic on what it does. It never gets all of the transactional data. On 1 account there are 5 Funds invested in - it pulled historical data from 2010 on 1, 2013 on a the 2nd, 2011 on the 3rd, 2013 on the 4th, and 2011 on the 5th... All 5 funds have data available back to 2007. For a 2nd account that has 4 invested funds it only pulled data back to 2020.. while data is available all the way back to 2006. Any help would be appreciated. I can only download transactional data as an XLS file from American Funds, so as we know, I can do nothing with that data in Quicken. It would be nice if Quicken could import from EXCEL this this probably would be solved.

Boatnmaniac

How much data is downloaded during account set up and successive downloads is something that is defined by the financial institution, not by Quicken.  It does seem odd, though that when you set up your American Funds accounts it pulls in data for different time periods like that.  There is nothing we can do to change/adjust this.

Anyway, I doubt that we'll ever see Quicken supporting imports directly from Excel.  Quicken uses proprietary connection processes and data file formats which requires financial institutions to pay for the right to use them.  If Quicken were to allow importing of Excel files then they would then lose out on that income stream.

There is a way to convert Excel files into something Quicken can import.  You might want to consider downloading and installing ImportQIF.  It is a freeware program developed by a long time Quicken user and very active participant in this Community forum.  You can read up on it and download it from http://www.quicknperlwiz.com/.  I have not used the program myself but others posting in Community have said it works well.

Boatnmaniac

How much data is downloaded during account set up and successive downloads is something that is defined by the financial institution, not by Quicken.  It does seem odd, though that when you set up your American Funds accounts it pulls in data for different time periods like that.  There is nothing we can do to change/adjust this.

Anyway, I doubt that we'll ever see Quicken supporting imports directly from Excel.  Quicken uses proprietary connection processes and data file formats which requires financial institutions to pay for the right to use them.  If Quicken were to allow importing of Excel files then they would then lose out on that income stream.

There is a way to convert Excel files into something Quicken can import.  You might want to consider downloading and installing ImportQIF.  It is a freeware program developed by a long time Quicken user and very active participant in this Community forum.  You can read up on it and download it from http://www.quicknperlwiz.com/.  I have not used the program myself but others posting in Community have said it works well.

qkn_kd

I appreciate the response, but it makes no sense. The exact same account with 5 investments using 4 different dates for pulling transactions... hmm.... of course no one at American Funds knows anything, they were useless and said call Quicken... It's so unfortunate Quicken has to monetize everything and the fees we pay to use their program aren't enough for them. You know how sick I am of closing the endless Zillow banner... Ads in Paid S/W what a joke... just when I started to like Quicken, I'm back to hating it more than I like it... arghhh...

Chris_QPW

Does American Funds allow downloading in "Web Connect/QFX" format?
That is the general way people use to backfill data, since most financial institution's limit the initial downloads.

BTW what Quicken does on the initial download is set the date for "as of" to a really old date, leaving it up to the financial institution to what it wants to send.  Quicken doesn't restrict this.  This interaction is recorded in the OFX log (what Quicken sends, and what it receives), Help -> Log Files -> OFX Logs, and in almost 100% of the cases what people blame on Quicken is really the fault of the financial institution.

Investment accounts (except for the new Schwab connection) is done with Direct Connect/OFX protocol, which means Quicken sends the OFX request directly the financial institution, and then receives a OFX response with the account information, transactions, and position information and prices.

Boatnmaniac

qkn_kd said:

I appreciate the response, but it makes no sense. The exact same account with 5 investments using 4 different dates for pulling transactions... hmm.... of course no one at American Funds knows anything, they were useless and said call Quicken...

I said "odd."  You said "makes no sense."  Semantics.  Bottom line is that the situation indicates there likely is something that American Funds is doing incorrectly in populating the OFX file.

Also, when calling a financial institution I have found that most Customer Service reps know squat about Quicken and will tend to point the finger at Quicken instead of engaging or connecting you with someone who does know about Quicken.  I usually end up having to very politely persist in requesting to be connected with a supervisor or someone in I/T who works with 3rd party applications for downloads of data.

qkn_kd said:

It's so unfortunate Quicken has to monetize everything and the fees we pay to use their program aren't enough for them. You know how sick I am of closing the endless Zillow banner... Ads in Paid S/W what a joke... just when I started to like Quicken, I'm back to hating it more than I like it... arghhh...

Businesses are in business to make money.  Those that don't, end up failing.  If Quicken were to remove an income stream they would need to replace that with something else.  That something else would likely be increasing our subscription costs and that's something I don't think any of us would like.

Although I am not sure what you mean by "Ads in Paid S/W".  I don't recall seeing ads unless my subscription is about to expire reminding me that it's time to renew my subscription.

Chris_QPW said:

Does American Funds allow downloading in "Web Connect/QFX" format?
That is the general way people use to backfill data, since most financial institution's limit the initial downloads.

From 2010-2019 I managed my mother's Capital Group-American Funds accounts.  At that time they did not support Web Connect...only supported Direct Connect.  I checked the FIDIR list before posting my comment above and it still shows Direct Connect only.  Which is why I structured my post above around how to import Excel files.  I guess I should have also stated that all the missing data could be entered manually, too.

@qkn-kd :  One thing I forgot to mention is that you appear to have set up your American Funds accounts as multi-fund accounts.  Is that correct?  I ask because when I was managing my mother's American Funds accounts they strongly recommended setting them up as single-fund accounts, not multiple-funds accounts.  I was told if I did not do this, that there could be some unexpected behavior encountered.  Maybe this is something you might want to try doing?  But if you do, you might want to do it in a new TEST data file instead of in your primary data file.  That way if it didn't fix the issue or you don't like the results you can simple delete that TEST data file with no harm done to your primary data file. 

qkn_kd

Great discussion guys I appreciate it. ImportQIF is amazing.. All my American Funds data is now in Quicken using this tool. unfortunately I'll have to keep doing it manually it would appear, although I would like to explore the log files further... I'll setup a test account with nothing in the file and make an American funds connection to see if I can interpret anything. From it.. if there are some examples of what I should look for that would be awesome.

Boatnmaniac

qkn_kd said:

Great discussion guys I appreciate it. ImportQIF is amazing.. All my American Funds data is now in Quicken using this tool. unfortunately I'll have to keep doing it manually it would appear, although I would like to explore the log files further... I'll setup a test account with nothing in the file and make an American funds connection to see if I can interpret anything. From it.. if there are some examples of what I should look for that would be awesome.

I'm glad to hear that you like how ImportQIF worked.  I'm sure @Chris_QPW likes hearing that even more than me since he is the developer. 

But, I am curious why you think you will need to continue doing it manually.  Why don't you think that Quicken will download the transactions and account data correctly going forward?