Quicken Cloud / Quicken on Web and my Quicken File

Zoolook

I'm not sure how I'd describe a perfect Sunday, but it definitely would not involve spending 6 hours trying to figure out how Quicken Cloud broke my data. I'm on Quicken Mac 6.5.1 running Monterey 12.1 on an Mac M1 Max.

It started yesterday when I opened Quicken on the Web (something I rarely do and will never do again) to check to see if my Investment Accounts were syncing there, as they're not on the Mobile App. I saw they were not and decided it wasn't important, so went to my desktop version again and hit update to sync across some edits I'd made on some latest downloads. Immediately I saw a problem, where my American Express account suddenly went form a balance of a few hundred dollars to over $42,000. No other account seemed to have a problem.

On checking it out, I saw that about 70 or so transactions from 2017 - early 2021 had been added and all of them were transfers to other credit cards (Discover, US Bank, Ikea etc). On further investigation, I saw that they all mirrored payments to those cards that had actually been made from my checking account. Even weirder, every single payment from my checking account had changed from a transfer to simple categorized as "Credit Card Payment" which is why my checking account balance had not changed, and neither had the balance of those card. Somehow those transfers all got transposed to my Amex.

OK no problem, I can restore from backup right? Wrong. I tried restoring from backup (the last one was Friday evening) and as soon as it came up, it immediately told me it couldn't find a matching Cloud account and I needed to restore one. OK, sure. 5 mins later, it's "restored" but the issue I described above immediately returned. 

OK time for a large coffee and some work. I proceeded to delete all of the transactions which of course messes up my other card balances, but then went through my checking account and re-added the transfers. This created new unreconciled items in those cards across 4 years, but hey I've got a Sunday to kill, so I fix them painful one by one. Now I want to recreate my cloud sync, so careful select "restore" to create one from scratch, But no, Quicken knows best and immediately recreates the problem. 2 hours of work undone in 15 seconds.

I basically repeat the process a second time, and notice that every Payee Name where these transfers are getting messed up is "Payment Received Thankyou". Usually I put the payee as the card name from my Checking account, partially for accuracy but also it makes things easier to find and makes Payee reports more useful. So I fix everything again change all the Payees back to what they should be, delete all the old cloud accounts, turn off syncing and backup. I then restore syncing creating a new file... and boom, named thing immediately happens again.

At this point I am in a bit of a panic so this time restore from backup again with WiFi off and then use the Export QXF feature to export all of my transactions. I create a brand new file with no cloud sync, and import all my old transactions. This actually finally works, and I am able to update all accounts. However for those that don't know, if you restore this way you lose:

1- All of your custom reports (I had about 30)
2 - All of the Quick Pay Payees and eBill
3 - Budgets

I also haven't turned on Cloud Sync. I am pretty sure this isn't something anyone else will ever have experienced, but I see one of the biggest issues here is that you cannot completely reset the cloud data (i.e., delete what is up there and COMPLETELY replace it, rules and all, with what's on your local machine). I still see old Quicken Windows cloud files sitting there that I can't delete either. In the event of some major issue like this, it would be great to be able to remotely purge everything, no questions asked, and start again.

I think most people know Quicken Cloud is unreliable, to put it mildly, but to be honest I have not had issues with it on Mac, only on Windows. So I guess this is one more step towards parity with Windows... just not exactly what I wanted.

jacobs

Zoolook said:

I think most people know Quicken Cloud is unreliable, to put it mildly, but to be honest I have not had issues with it on Mac, only on Windows. So I guess this is one more step towards parity with Windows...

@Zoolook That made me laugh out loud.    I know you wrote it out of frustration, but thanks for the laugh.

I'm glad you battled though to come to a solution, unpleasant though it was. Should you (or anyone else) encounter the again, I think there should be an easier path to recovery. I haven't been in this position — I don't use Quicken Cloud because I've read too many stories like yours — but this is what I think would work:

In your desktop Quicken with the messed up transactions, in Preferences > Mobile, Web & Alerts, turn off Sync. Then go to Preferences > Connected Services and click on the Reset button. This deletes the existing Cloud account for this file and replaces it with a new one. But because Sync is turned off, the Cloud account has only some identifying information but not your transactions. Now restore your data file from a recent backup. There is no existing Cloud file to overwrite the data in this backup file, so your transactions shouldn't change. Immediately turn off Sync, and for good measure, Reset your Cloud account. (If it squawks about a missing Cloud file, I think you should be able to get to Reset.)

Chris_QPW

@jacobs Just as a FYI I also think this will work since this exact problem has come up on the Windows side, and the recommendation to get around this looks very close to what you have suggested.

The suggestion on the Windows side is to create a new data file with Sync on.  From there one can go to the Quicken ID & Cloud Accounts preference and there is a link in there that allows deleting of a cloud dataset as long as it isn't the current on (the reason for using a different data file).  So, one deletes the dataset for the original data file, and then goes back and does the restore with it gone.

I'm guessing that the reason no one hit on an idea exactly like yours is because a year or so ago they crippled the Quicken Windows settings.  If one turns off Sync on Windows, you no longer can get to the "reset" of the cloud dataset.

jacobs

RickO said:

It's stories like this that remind me why I never have and never will turn on Sync.

Amen! While being able to check or enter something in Quicken when I'm away from my desktop would be helpful from time to time, it isn't something I strongly need. And seeing these types of downside stories convinced me long ago not to use Sync and the mobile app/web interface. 

Zoolook

Thanks for the comments. @jacobs your suggestion looks really useful, I didn't really notice before that you can trick Quicken by turning off sync but still resetting the cloud account. Very useful.

One unforeseen outcome of this was Quicken seemed confused about which credit card payments had been scheduled. I should have just cancelled them all, but assume the Quick Pay was something set up on the card itself, not something store on the Quicken servers. The outcome is my Ikea Card was paid twice (although the second payment never goes higher than the account balance, and because I always pay the full balance, nothing went wrong). But Discover didn't get a payment at all, but again I got an alert from Quicken the day before and had time to fix it.

Kudos for the controls ensuring payments aren't missed, but when you restore from old backups or using transaction exports, just remember Bills may not be paid because the ID of the file is different.

Still haven't turned on sync...

Chris_QPW

@Zoolook your comments on what happens to “Quicken Bill Manager” and its associated services is one reason I would never recommend anyone using Quicken Bill Manager.  To me it is a much too complicated system with tons of ways it can go wrong.

You have Quicken sending information to the Quicken Cloud dataset, and whatever it is going to store there, then there is the communication to the third-party service that does that actual logging into the biller's websites.  And there isn't any standard on how it does that login/sending of commands.

And you will never get any kind of exact clarification of how it all works.  As which servers cache your usernames and passwords?  If you schedule a repeating payment, where is it stored?

aeolos747

I had the same issue as the original poster and also have spent an enormous amount of time trying to correct the errors. They are all transfers between accounts that got screwed up, just like what @Zoolook reported.

I've tried both of the suggested fixes from @jacobs and @Chris_QPW. When I start again after deleting the old cloud account, I set up downloads which then require enabling cloud services again. At that time, some transactions get messed up again!

Any idea what is going on here? For those of you that don't use cloud sync, I guess you don't use the internet downloads?

Chris_QPW

aeolos747 said:

Any idea what is going on here? For those of you that don't use cloud sync, I guess you don't use the internet downloads?

Sorry I don't have any ideas on how to fix your problems, I just thought I would answer this question.
I only use Direct Connect for downloading transactions, and I don't use Quicken Bill Pay or Online Bills.

Jon

aeolos747 said:

For those of you that don't use cloud sync, I guess you don't use the internet downloads?

Cloud syncing and downloading transactions are two different things. I download transactions to my accounts but I don't have cloud syncing turned on. 

aeolos747

Hmm, I guess it wasnt caused by the cloud sync. I also only use download transactions so I verified it was turned off and still had issues.

Could something be prompting Quicken to use QuickRules to overwrite the old transactions? I found some rules that look like what I keep having to correct when download new bank transactions (oddly even though I told each account to only download transactions in the last month).

Zoolook

RickO said:

AFAIK, QuickFill rules should only be applied when a transaction is first entered or downloaded. They should not modify and already entered transaction. But as a test, can you delete the related QF rule(s) and see if the issue stops?

I think they're also re-applied at sync, which is what breaks everything. In fact just this morning a got a series of errors around rules not syncing (Hulu, Chase, Discover etc.) none of which have been changed since my last download. I'd also like to know from someone at Quicken why rules are even being synced if I've turned syncing off.

aeolos747

@Zoolook, seems like you and I had a similar issue. I turned off the cloud sync and deleted the QuickRules that seemed to be causing the issues with transfers. It seems to have resolved the issue although I've only done three syncs so far.

Zoolook

aeolos747 said:

@Zoolook, seems like you and I had a similar issue. I turned off the cloud sync and deleted the QuickRules that seemed to be causing the issues with transfers. It seems to have resolved the issue although I've only done three syncs so far.

When you said delete the quick rules, did you literally just go to Quickfill rules and delete anything with category of transfer?

aeolos747

@Zoolook There were a few QuickRules which were causing the issue, I only had to delete a few. It appeared to rename transfer transactions which then screwed up many account balances (e.g. it saw an "American Express" transfer and consistently transfered to just the same Amex account, despite me owning multiple accounts). It is still odd it was applying these QuickRules to old transactions as far back as 2017, even if they were reconciled.

MSC

I have a similar issue. In my case, more than 60 memorized split transactions from May 1, 2017 to Dec 31, 2021 were corrupted.

I had 3 memorized split transactions:
2 different paychecks with splits for tax and insurance withholdings
1 monthly mortgage payment with splits for interest and escrowed taxes and insurance

In all 3 cases:
- All transactions had been cleared and reconciled.
- The splits were gone, and only the net amounts were recorded. (net salary, total to mortgage co.)
- Everything before May 1, 2017, was ok.

I discovered this on Feb 26. The most recent uncorrupted backup file was dated Jan 3, 2022. The next backup on Jan 6 was corrupted.

I tried restoring the Jan 3 backup. However, Schwab downloads didn't work in this restored backup. I wasn't in the mood to wrestle with that issue again or reenter two months of transactions.

I ended up "fixing" the problem by entering dummy transactions in my current file to true up actual spending on the split categories (interest, tax, medical insurance, etc.). I also disconnected cloud synch just to be safe.

Windows 11, Quicken Home, and Business R38.30 (now) I Don't know the Quicken versions for Jan 3 or Jan 6 backups.

Zoolook

Well well well