Loan account with outstanding balance shows "This loan is paid off"

jethroe

I have 3 loan accounts using express web connect to automatically update from banking institutions. 1 is working properly and shows loan details with bar graph. The other two are showing "This loan is paid off" with a loan balance listed above. I can't enter any other loan information manually and can't see any transactions. I've checked the settings for all three accounts. The one that is displaying correct automatically adjusted to a loan account but the other two are only letting me select "credit" or "liability". I have all three listed in the accounts section under "Property & Debt" since I selected them all as liability upon the initial setup. How can I fix this?

Tom Young

This is not an uncommon complaint in here with "connected" loans.  When you have a connected loan there's no loan register available to you.  The fiction is that whatever you're getting from the lender is "correct" so why would Quicken allow you to mess up "perfection?"

I think the problem probably relates back to the fact that so many connected loans use Express Web Connect (EWS) as the downloading method.  EWS is simply not as reliable as Direct Connect as it generally uses some sort of "screen scraping" method whereby Quicken logs into your account with the lender and attempts to find the correct information.  But if the lender makes any sort of changes to its screens without telling Quicken beforehand, Quicken can't find the information it needs.  I expect the "This loan is paid off" message is the default message that really should read "Oops, we can't find the information."

If you want to continue with a connected loan you probably should contact Quicken support.  If the problem really is on the lender's end then Quicken will need to re-write the "script" that's used to find information from that particular lender.

UKR

Just my 2cents' worth ... I would not bother attempting to activate any loan or mortgage account for downloading.  (Not discussing LOC or HELOC accounts here which should be treated like credit card accounts)

At least in Quicken for Windows, an online-connected loan or mortgage account does NOT have a transaction register. All data shown in the account come from whatever information the bank downloads to you ... if this process works at all.

As a result of being connected, the scheduled payment transaction reminder cannot transfer the amount of principal paid into the (non existent) account register and must use a category, usually something like Loan:Principal, instead. The category seems to vary with the Loan Type you selected when creating the loan account in Quicken.

Effective with Quicken Windows 2018+
you can deactivate an online-connected loan account and regain full control over your transaction register.  However, you should still review the Scheduled Reminder (or Memorized Payee List entry) associated with the monthly loan payments to ensure they now transfer Principal to the loan account register and not to a Category.

If you're a Q Mac user, you should be able to do something similar about setting up and maintaining an offline mortgage account together with a correctly calculated Scheduled Transaction Reminder for the monthly payments from your checking account.

jethroe

I figured this out. If I add the account by selecting the "Add a new loan..." in the "Property & Debt" tab, the accounts are added correctly. Originally I was using the "Add Account" from the "+" above the list of accounts on the home screen.

NotACPA

@jethroe If any of those 3 loans are traditional mortgages, the "Mortgage Wizard" works well for keeping track to the Prin/Int split in each payment, because these are "monthly interest loans"

BUT, for Auto loans and other personal loans, which are almost always "daily interest", the mortgage wizard can't correctly calculate the Prin/Int split because the amount of Interest due this month depends, in large part, upon what date last month's payment was posted by the bank, and Q has no way of knowing that.

For these loans, just post a guesstimate and edit it when the next statement comes in.