Start with only adding data to Quicken On The Web - Then install QMac or Qwin ?

I haven't used Quicken on the Web, but if I understand correctly all you need to do is open up the preferences in Quicken Mac, go to the "Mobile, Web & Alerts" tab, turn on Sync, and log in using the same Quicken ID that you used for Quicken on the Web and it will automatically sync your Quicken on the Web info into Quicken Mac. I would create a new Quicken Mac file before doing this just to make sure you don't have anything on your Mac accidentally getting uploaded to mess up your existing Quicken on the Web data.

Ot the other hand, this thread from a few months ago seems to indicate that doesn't work:

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7900392/how-do-i-export-an-account-from-quicken-on-the-web

Could you clarify: you started using the Quicken web app without purchasing or installing the Quicken Mac desktop program? (Or you purchased a subscription, but only used your Quicken ID for the web interface until now?)

Here's what's fascinating to me, and I think will be to some of my fellow Quicken Mac users here (@Jon, @John_in_NC, @RickO), because what Quicken says in their video about using Quicken web app runs contrary to what we all have previously believed...

Our understanding was that you had to start with a Quicken Mac desktop file, and then you could sync in to a Quicken Cloud file which you could access via the web interface. But I just watched Quicken's "Getting Started on the Quicken Web App" video (linked on this page, and directly on YouTube here). In the first 10 seconds, it describes the web app as "a simple yet powerful companion to the Quicken desktop app" but it does not does not mention any need to use the desktop product to get started. It details how to create accounts, set up bills, and create a budget — all with no mention of the desktop app. Only at the 3:37 mark does it say, "if, at any time, you'd like to access the more advanced features of the desktop version, just download it [showing a link in the web app which says 'Do more with desktop version']. Then, sign in with your Quicken ID, and all the information you've set up on the web will be automatically synced and set up on your desktop."

Whaaat?? This is not what I previously understood. And I'm not sure whether it's accurate or not. On another Quicken web page, it states: "A Quicken Cloud account is automatically created when you create a Quicken ID", which would apparently explain why a Quicken web user could start using it right away without using a desktop file. But it also says: "The Quicken Cloud is not a backup; you can't restore Quicken data from the Quicken Cloud" and further down "at least one [desktop] data file needs to be synced to the cloud".

I'm not sure how to resolve these seemingly contradictory statements. If you can start using the Quicken web app as soon as you create a Quicken ID, and you can access the more advanced features of the desktop version by signing in with your Quicken ID, it sure sounds like you can do as David has done, and pull data from the Cloud into a new Quicken desktop file — even though in another breath it says you cannot restore data from Quicken Cloud. There is no explanation in the video, or anywhere that I could find online, about how to start on the web app, then launch either the Quicken Mac or Quicken Web desktop app, and have your web data automatically populate the desktop data file. In Quicken Mac, the "Let's Get Started" page does not have an option to start a data file from data downloaded form a Quicken Cloud account. So I'm confused.

@DavidDalley Hang in there with us as we try to get to the bottom of this. You asked if there's a way to export or download the web file, and I'm certain the answer to that is no. But Quicken clearly states there is a way to download your data to a desktop file via the desktop-to-cloud two-way sync functionality. We just have to figure out how to trigger that starting from the cloud rather than the desktop.

Fellow Mac users, any clues how to do this? Can any of the Quicken moderators shed light on this?

First and foremost I would like to see a screenshot of what your Quicken Web interface looks like. You can blank out anything personal. Just want to see the menus.

Next Do not install Quicken Mac and sync!

This has come up in posts before and we have never got to the bottom of it, and the Moderators have been no help figuring out what is going on.

Where is what is known, at least from what has happened on the Windows side.

Person pays for subscription, person goes to Quicken Web and logs in and starts using it.
They are able to create accounts, budgets and so forth. This should be impossible!

User gets curious about the “advanced features” and installs Quicken Desktop, and does their first sync.
The “Quicken cloud dataset” that they have been using in Quicken Web becomes inaccessible!
They now have a empty dataset that is connected to the Quicken Desktop data file and that is it!

Quicken Mobile/Web are suppose to be companion Apps, to the Desktop program/data file.
You are supposed to only be able to create accounts, budgets, and such from the Desktop program.

By the time all the other people have posted they had already installed Quicken Desktop and synced, and were complaining about not being able to get to the Quicken Web data that they have been working with since getting the subscription.

Since I have a second Mac at my disposal I decided to see if I could get Quicken data off the cloud onto it. So far no dice.

I first set up Quicken Sync with a trial Quicken file on my main Mac & verified that the account info got uploaded & I could view it on the Quicken on the Web website.

I then installed Quicken on my other Mac and set it up with the same Quicken ID. It then gave me the usual file creation options with nothing related to downloading from the cloud. I set up a new file and turned on Quicken Sync, giving it the same cloud account name as I did on my regular Mac. Still nothing. I tried selecting the Update Accounts button but that didn't download anything.

When I go to the Connected Services tab in Preferences and select "See all Cloud Accounts", I see two Cloud Accounts with the same name (one for each Mac), but there doesn't seem to be a way to select the other one - each Mac seems to be locked in to the cloud account it created and won't use the other one. I can access both of them through the web site - they are both still there but I can only interact with one of them at a time. So I didn't lose anything but I now have two completely separate cloud accounts with identical names.

This isn't identical to the situation where someone starts using Quicken on the Web without ever having used Quicken on the desktop, but it does suggest that when Quicken is first installed on the desktop & cloud access is being set up, the set up is entirely one way - from the Mac to the Web. Once the setup is established, you can enter transactions on the web & they download to the Mac, but it seems anything that was on the web before setting up Quicken Sync on the Mac at best gets ignored.

Here is a link to one of these discussions.
https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7907379/start-on-web-add-desktop-lose-everything

@Jon I'm not sure if any of us can test this unless without a new Quicken ID which has a subscription. The key is to create a new Quicken ID, use only the Quicken web app to create and account or two and download some transactions to that Quicken Cloud account; then in Quicken Mac, sign out of Quicken, sign back in using the new Quicken ID which has never been used on any desktop data file, and see if there's a way to get the cloud data to sync with a new Quicken data file.

In the test you did, you were using a Quicken ID which had already been used with a desktop file. If there is actually a way to do what Quicken says in its instructional video, it needs to be tested with a Quicken ID which has a Quicken Cloud dataset that is not yet associated with a desktop data file.

It seems to me that if you use any of the options on the Quicken Mac Let's Get Started page, Quicken will create a new data file and create a new Cloud account to go with it — essentially "orphaning" the data in the Cloud account originally created when the Quicken ID was created an used by the web app.

Chris_QPW said:

You are supposed to only be able to create accounts, budgets, and such from the Desktop program.

Clearly not, since all these options not only exist in the web app, Quicken's instructions on getting started with the web app shows this is exactly what a user should do.

It seems inconceivable that Quicken produced a four-minute video two years ago on "Getting Started on the Quicken Web App" — which clearly and at great length tells users to create accounts, bill payments and a budget via the web app, and only optionally suggests then hopping over to the desktop application — that flat-out can't work as the video lays out.

The video unfortunately doesn't say how get started in the desktop program after downloading the application and logging in. Is it possible that if you launch Quicken Mac or Quicken Windows and log in using a Quicken ID which has never synced to Quicken Cloud before, it magically knows to create a desktop data file, associate the existing stand-alone Cloud dataset with this new desktop data file, and download the existing Cloud data to the empty desktop file? That sure seems unlikely to me, but I don't think there's a way to test it because it would require a Quicken ID with a valid subscription which has never been used before.

And if it actually can't be done, how is it possible that Quicken produced a how-to video which is completely wrong about its family or products?! And potentially left users who followed their instructions, like the original poster of this thread, high, dry and out of luck? That would be an egregious mistake. So I'd like to press for answers from the folks at Quicken about how this actually works.

@jacobs of course you are bring up exactly what has come up in those past threads. I just found the last one, but there were several others. And no amount of pleading with the Moderators got any responses of what is going on.

Is it that they start with the Simpifi interface?
Is it a that there features are there and they are just turned off wait for some kind of development?
After all people have been requesting such features from the Mobile/Web App since they were created.
Is it only true for the Web App, as this date I haven’t seen anyone say they had the same thing happen when starting with the Mobile App, only the Web App.

And I agree, I said install and sync, but you are probably right, once you install Quicken Desktop you are probably already messed up.

Note I don’t remember exactly when the first post on this came up, but it isn’t recent. It is at least over a year.

I have been tempted several times to pay for a subscription just to test it, but I haven’t. Recently I got a free copy of Starter edition with TurboTax and it was eating at me that I wanted to do something special before I started using it just for testing, but I couldn’t remember what it was and didn’t test this out. It is like that these postings have been spaced out by several months, so I remember them when people posted but not on a day to day basis.

I haven't redeemed my free Starter Quicken offer from TurboTax yet, maybe I'll do that.

@Chris_QPW Sorry I'm late to the party.

I don't follow the Quicken Web part of this forum nor use the web app, so I haven't seen those other posts before. Nor had I seen the "smoking gun" Quicken video which instructs users to start with the web app and migrate to the desktop app. I was hoping someone had a straightforward answer which I was just unaware of.

OK, I'm getting started setting up a new account. One thing I'll note right off the bat. When I initially finished purchasing my new account I had the option of either downloading the program or logging in to Quicken on the Web, but no emphasis was given to either one, they were just two of several options on the screen at that point. (Edit; now that I think about it, I don't think there was actually an option to download the program on screen, instead I had the option of either logging into Quicken on the Web or logging into my Quicken account which among other things would have links to download the program).

If you choose to log in to Quicken on the Web, the first thing it does is ask you to choose either Mac or Windows. But this isn't presented as something that you have to install right now, it just asks "hey, if you want to use the desktop program later, which one: Mac or Windows?". As soon as you make that selection & hit the Next button, the very next thing you see is the video @jacobs linked to above that tells you to go ahead & create your accounts using Quicken on the Web. And when you're done watching that video it immediately prompts you to add your first account.

So new users who purchase Quicken on Quicken's web page are not encouraged towards the desktop program, and if they choose to go to the web interface first they are being funneled directly into setting things up on the web & NOT on the desktop.

Well, that was interesting. After I created a couple bank accounts on the web interface (manual accounts, not linked to a bank), I re-downloaded Quicken & re-installed it on my second Mac (I had deleted it after I was done playing around the first time). It prompted me for my Quicken ID credentials, I entered the same ones I used to set up my new account, and it downloaded everything into Quicken just as I had entered on the web. I didn't lose a thing. I don't think I even had to tell it to create a new file; I entered my Quicken ID credentials & a few seconds later I was looking at my data.

I'll note that I was still logged in to Quicken on the Web while I did this. But when I log out & log back in again everything is still there on the web interface.

So I don't have any insights at this point into how new users are losing their data unless it's a bug that just happens sometimes. For me, tonight, it worked the way it ought to work.

Very interesting. It entirely possible that the bug of orphaning the cloud dataset is only on the Windows side.

Once you were connected to the Desktop data file, can you still create accounts in Quicken Web?

I just thought of something. You said it asked if the person is using Mac or Windows. If a person said Mac then I would think that the cloud dataset would be created in the Mac "section". As you might know the Mac and the Windows cloud datasets are kept separate. Now say they installed on Quicken on Windows. That cloud dataset wouldn't be seen because it is in the wrong "section"!

I did not know that Quicken on the Web files were segregated between Windows & Mac. I think you might be on to something there, since I was able to get that to happen to me.

I decided to download & install Quicken on one of my Windows machines. I got through the installation, entered my Quicken ID credentials, and got to a screen that asked if I was a new user or had used Quicken before. I chose the latter. It next asked me to select my existing data file to get started, and I chose "Restore a data file I've backed up to a CD, a disk, or online" as being the only one likely to get me my Quicken on the Web data but then there was no backup file I could select to restore from. There didn't seem to be any way out of this dead end so I exited the program & restarted, and it opened a new empty data file.

I then logged into Quicken on the Web and it initially appeared that my previous data was all gone. I was at the "Hello. It looks like you have not synced your accounts yet" screen, and regardless of whether I selected Windows or Mac from that screen there was no data. But when I clicked on the Profile button I was able to switch back to the Mac file & my data was still there. If I didn't know there were multiple files, however, I might have thought that my data was just gone. It wasn't, but just running Quicken Windows seemed to affect what I saw when I logged back in to Quicken on the Web & show me something different than what I had been looking at the last time I was logged in.

And there was no way to access the original data I had created using Quicken on the Web from Quicken Windows, it just couldn't see it at all. Of course this was after I had already synced it to Quicken Mac, but since I had already told it Mac right at the beginning maybe that didn't matter.

I wonder if my free Quicken Starter offer from TurboTax 2020 is still good, might be worth taking another pass through this on a brand new account without ever using Quicken Mac.

@Jon Thanks so much for diving into this and testing!

Chris_QPW said:

Very interesting. It entirely possible that the bug of orphaning the cloud dataset is only on the Windows side.

Well, we don't know if there's a bug there or not. To me, the key to @Jon's test was that he had a "solo" Quicken Cloud dataset associated with his Quicken ID the very first time he launched the desktop Quicken Mac and logged in with his Quicken ID. As I had guessed and he confirmed, he did not get sent to the normal "Let's get started" page where a user selects whether to start from scratch or some older data file; instead, the desktop app checked to see if this Quicken ID had any data in a Quicken Cloud dataset, created a new file, and associated the desktop file with the existing Cloud file — all without the user having to select or link anything.

It would be interesting to see if the same happens with Quicken Windows. Testing that again requires a new Quicken ID never before used, along with a valid Quicken subscription.

-----

@DavidDalley I hope you're still out there and not deterred by some of us longtime Quicken geeks exploring many layers of this issue, but we now seem to have something of an answer to your question which started this thread!

You said you installed the desktop Quicken Mac application. Did you ever launch the application? If so, did it ask you to log in with your Quicken ID? According to the test that @Jon performed above, if you have data in a Quicken Cloud file, the first time you log into Quicken Mac with your Quicken ID, it should automatically create a new file for you and download everything you entered in the Cloud to your desktop data file. At that point, the desktop data and the Cloud data are linked so that changes to one can be synced to the other.

(In the desktop program, if you've entered new data or edited data, you can initiate a manual sync or it will sync when you do Update All Accounts; you should be sure to sync after entering data on one platform or the other, to try to make sure the latest data exists in both places. Quicken's sync is sophisticated, but there are known to be problems with it, which is why many of us Quicken veterans choose to not use the web app and keep the Sync setting in the desktop program turned off.)

If you installed the desktop program, launched it, logged in, and your data did not sync from your Cloud dataset, please describe exactly what you did and what happened.

@Jon many thanks for looking into this!
The datasets have to be separated because Quicken Windows and Quicken Mac don't completely agree on what/how to sync the data.
This is what that looks like on Quicken Windows:

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/6031128/uploads/editor/sk/jjx5959jey6y.png

@jacobs you are right, given that we have no idea how this is supposed to work calling it a bug is a "stretch"

Here is a bit of "theory" (some might call it guessing!) of why this might work this way.

The Quicken Desktop data file can have a whole lot more data in it that then the Quicken Cloud dataset. And I know that it did start out as the "master" in the sync when they first created sync to mobile (which is actually syncing to the Quicken Cloud dataset set with the mobile app being the GUI for it).

The Quicken Cloud dataset was always somewhat independent, because the servers were in charge of connecting to the financial institutions (Direct Connect) or to Intuit's servers (Quicken Connect/Express Web Connect) periodically (or on demand) to fetch new transactions.

At the time where there isn't any Quicken Desktop data file and you first install it, would be a pretty simple syncing back of what data there is in the Quicken Cloud dataset.

But once that is done it can get really complicated if the Quicken Cloud dataset remained the "master" or even "equal" in the sync because of all the extra things that the Quicken Desktop can do that the Quicke Cloud dataset can't to. So, maybe partly due to history, and partly due to the technical challenges they go into the master (Quicken Desktop data file), slave (Quicken Cloud dataset) kind of sync. What's more I didn't see anything in the "Cloud only" flow for creating multiple datasets. In the Desktop you can create as many data files as you like, and each will have a Quicken cloud dataset, so it becomes even harder to manage from the Quicken Web side.

BTW for the record, it has always been stated (Including by the Moderators and Quicken Support, and documentation) that "Quicken Cloud isn't a backup, you can't restore from it." So, this definitely a one-time deal, for the change over from "Cloud only", to Desktop syncing with Cloud, and the Desktop is the master.
Here is an article about it. And notice it makes no mention of using Quicken Web by itself:
https://www.quicken.com/support/what-quicken-cloud

Greg_the_Geek

FWIW, this was posted by one of the Mods. It only applies to Quicken Mac.

You can create a new data file on the Quicken for Mac desktop program using cloud data by holding the Command key on your keyboard and navigating to File > New. Continue holding the Command key until you see the Let's Get Started window open. In there, you should then see the very last option for Start from Quicken Cloud Account.

Greg_the_Geek said:

FWIW, this was posted by one of the Mods. It only applies to Quicken Mac.

You can create a new data file on the Quicken for Mac desktop program using cloud data by holding the Command key on your keyboard and navigating to File > New. Continue holding the Command key until you see the Let's Get Started window open. In there, you should then see the very last option for Start from Quicken Cloud Account.

From this it sounds like Quicken Mac indeed is different from Quicken Windows, that doesn't have this feature.

Here is another quirk to this story I thought of.
The purchase has to be at Quicken.com.

If you buy from a third-party you get an activation code. There isn't any place to put that into Quicken Web. You can only put in activation codes in the Desktop application.

So, for this situation to happen one has to be purchasing it from Quicken.com where it will automatically activate the subscription in the Quicken Id after the purchase.

Can't you enter a subscription activation code from a retail box when you create your Quicken ID on Quicken.com?

jacobs said:

Can't you enter a subscription activation code from a retail box when you create your Quicken ID on Quicken.com?

No, you can't.