Adding a new Wells Fargo savings account to quicken caused me to lose five years of banking data!

Al6402

On April 21 I attempted to add a new Wells Fargo savings account to my Quicken program. Attempting to do it caused me to lose five years of banking data! Only with the help of a very patient tech-support guy from Quicken was I able to restore my data. But when I attempted to reinstall that new savings account from Wells Fargo it once again wiped out all my historical data. Fortunately I was able to once again restore my data but now I am never going to use the “add savings account. I can be reached at [Removed - Personal Information]

jacobs

Al, for better or worse, your path is through Quicken Support. If you get someone who isn't helpful, as in your first experience, you can politely move to fairly quickly end the call. And then you try again and hope the next person you get is better. Or you could call and ask to speak to a Level 2 Support representative; they don't offer this without going through troubleshooting with you first, but I think if you say you've already had two calls with Support but still have a problem with data loss, you might be able to get switched to someone (or an appointment scheduled for a call-back). 

Your goal is to get someone screen share with you and have you walk through the steps you've done twice resulting in data loss. Hopefully they can see it, verify that something unexpected is happening, and collect whatever data they need to create an internal support ticket for the development team to investigate. 

In other instances, you could use the Report a Problem feature on the Quicken Help menu to report a bug. But that's a one-way flow of information; they don't respond to submissions, so you don't know if they understand your submission or can verify/reproduce it. And in this case, you have a complex issue which seems to be fairly unique to you, so the odds that they would be able to reproduce it based on just your description of the issue is quite small. So I wouldn't recommend that (unless a Support representative tells you to use it as a way to transmit your log files to them for investigation.) 

Quicken Jared

Al6402 said:

On April 21 I attempted to add a new Wells Fargo savings account to my Quicken program. Attempting to do it caused me to lose five years of banking data! Only with the help of a very patient tech-support guy from Quicken was I able to restore my data. But when I attempted to reinstall that new savings account from Wells Fargo it once again wiped out all my historical data. Fortunately I was able to once again restore my data but now I am never going to use the “add savings account. I can be reached at [Removed - Personal Information]

Hello @Al6402, 

I am sorry to hear about this problem with data seemingly missing. Thank you for reaching out to the Quicken Community in regards to this problem. 

What, specifically, seemed to cause this data loss? Are you able to provide any other details about what happened? Also, have you noticed any error messages when attempting to add or link your accounts? I am glad to hear that the data was able to be restored, although I hope to hear more about this incident.

I hope to hear any response you may be able to provide. 

Thank you,

Quicken Jared 

Al6402

Thank you for your response to my post. I consider this a very dangerous bug and should be repaired immediately. Somebody else may be damaged by this. I am eager to share lots of information about what happened to me but it obviously involves my private information. Are you an employee of Quicken?

NotACPA

You  didn't answer any of @Quicken Jared's questions.  We can't diagnose your issue without that info.

And, YES, Jared is a Q employee.  That's why his ID starts with the work Quicken.  Such ism allowed otherwise.

See this page for more info: https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7849427/whos-who-on-the-community

Al6402

Forgive me for being cautious but I am a new member in this forum and did not know who's who on the community.

As I said on my original post when I was attempting to add a new savings account to my Quicken program I use the add new account function, pointed it towards Wells Fargo bank and chose the new Wells Fargo account that showed up. When I selected our new account it resulted in not adding the account I asked for but instead added my son's savings account which I did not want to have in my Quicken. And when I examined my Wells account on Quicken I discovered that all the data was wiped out except for the last few weeks!

I received no error messages.

As I said I was able to re-create this bug when I subsequently attempted to connect that account again.

Do you want the log files?

Al6402

Why aren't you doing anything about this dangerous bug? Followthru?

Quicken Jared

Al6402 said:

Forgive me for being cautious but I am a new member in this forum and did not know who's who on the community.

As I said on my original post when I was attempting to add a new savings account to my Quicken program I use the add new account function, pointed it towards Wells Fargo bank and chose the new Wells Fargo account that showed up. When I selected our new account it resulted in not adding the account I asked for but instead added my son's savings account which I did not want to have in my Quicken. And when I examined my Wells account on Quicken I discovered that all the data was wiped out except for the last few weeks!

I received no error messages.

As I said I was able to re-create this bug when I subsequently attempted to connect that account again.

Do you want the log files?

Hello @AI6402, 

Thank you for following up with me and providing answers to the earlier questions I had posed. I am sorry that the source of this issue seems unclear, for the moment. 

It sounds as though the wrong account was linked when in the Add Account screen displayed below, during the process of setting up online banking connections. Either this is because the wrong account was selected in this screen for linking to an existing account with Quicken itself, or it may be a consequence of the incorrect accounts being detected and displayed in the screen, which would pertain to information provided by the financial institution. Do you remember seeing all of your accounts listed when you were brought to the screen below?



I do recommend reaching out to Quicken Support if you should notice something like this happening again, as they have tools that will enable them to determine exactly which of these two scenarios is taking place. This will help us isolate the source of the problem more definitively. You can, of course, reach out to Quicken Support anytime using the information provided in this link.

I hope that is helpful. 

Thank you,

Quicken Jared 

jacobs

Al6402 said:

Why aren't you doing anything about this dangerous bug? Followthru?

I understand your frustration, but it's likely that there isn't any problem on Quicken's radar yet. The issue you describe hasn't happened to many users; there have been no similar reports in this forum. This forum is fellow Quicken users (like me) who try to help each other, with help provided by the handful of Quicken moderators (like Jared). There are a lot of potential factors at play in the situation you describe, so it's not immediately obvious to anyone here what happened. We can only say that even if the wrong account got linked, it wouldn't normally delete existing transactions.

I'm wondering if you have mobile Sync turned on, and if that could be a piece of the puzzle. Is Sync on or off (in Preferences > Mobile, Web & Alerts)? If it's on, do you use the mobile app or web interface? If it's on, my gut feeling is you should turn if off and Reset your Cloud account (in Preferences > Connected Services), to eliminate any possibility of Quicken's Cloud server downloading from your newly-added account, and then thinking it should supersede the data in your desktop file. 

I also wonder what would happen if you temporarily disconnected your existing account from downloading, and then added the new account as a separate account. Does it add correctly? Do transactions for that account download into Quicken, while those in your existing account remain untouched? 

If there is some actual bug with the connectivity to your financial institution which is causing your existing transactions to disappear, you'll need to get Quicken Support to the bug in action and/or figure out how to reproduce it, in order to create a bug ticket to send to the development team. 

I know you're frustrated with the problems you've encountered, quite understandably, but my advice to you is that the path forward is to continue to pursue this to either find out something you need to do differently to avoid the result you've encountered, or to get a bug report documented so it can be addressed. 

Al6402

Thank you for responding.

I really don't want to link my savings or checking account to my quicken. When I reconcile my account I go to my bank and download the transaction range I want and then click on the.QXF file to update my account. So I may try the procedure you suggested to disconnect from my update. But I don't think that was the cause of my problem.

I was using Accounts/ Setup Transaction Download to get the new savings account to show up on Quicken portfolio. I may be using the wrong thing to do this. It did show all my Wells Fargo accounts and I'm sure I chose the correct account because it happened again when I tried to reconnect after restoring all my data and I was very careful to make sure I chose the right account.

It may very well be a problem with the Wells Fargo connection but I am very surprised to learn that some command from Wells Fargo could cause Quicken to destroy six years worth of data without warning!

Don't you want to examine my log file? It would seem that would answer many of your questions.

As I said in my original post I did contact support and the first person I talked to was very unhelpful and eventually said "you're on your own". The second person I contacted at tech support, named “Willie,” was extremely helpful and patient and managed to show me how to restore all my data in that account but had no idea why this happened. This seems to me like a "level one" bug and Quicken would want to find out what happened to prevent this from happening again and that is why I posted to the Quicken Community.

Thank you for your patience.

Al Alcorn

jacobs

Al6402 said:

Don't you want to examine my log file? It would seem that would answer many of your questions.

I'm just a fellow Quicken user, not a Quicken employe, so I wouldn't ask to see anyone's personal data beyond a screenshot (which can have personal info blocked out).

And you're correct that there shouldn't be anything which happens when downloading data which would wipe out an entire account's data. But it's also not clear what the problem is, because this doesn't seem to be something other users are reporting. 

I personally don't connect my bank accounts to Quicken at all, except in a test file; I enter everything manually. I do so because I've found it doesn't take me much longer to enter my transactions than it does to download and then edit Payees, edit categories, create splits, etc. (My volume of accounts and transactions makes this feasible for me; it's certainly not something I'd recommend for everyone!) And in doing so, I avoid any and all problems with connectivity to financial institutions. Most people want to download transactions, either directly into Quicken or via a QFX file they import into Quicken.  While there are sometimes outages or problems with specific financial institutions, I've never heard of downloads wiping out existing data... except if there's something which gets out of sync between the data in your local file and the data in Quicken Cloud. That's why I discussed turning off Sync and resetting Quicken Cloud -- to try to eliminate that as a possible source of any problems going forward. I, and many of the longtime Quicken users here, tend to be wary of the Quicken Cloud/mobile/web syncing due to problems we've seen reported many times over the years. 

As for Quicken Support, from my observations and personal interactions over the years, I'd say Quicken is like every other company: most support representatives are at least moderately helpful, some are outstanding, and some are not at all good. If anyone from Quicken management were reading this (which I doubt) they should be appalled that the first Support representative you spoke with told you "you're on your own." Any Support representative should, at the least, be able to guide you to switch to one of your backup files. I can understand that the second rep couldn't explain what happened, because this doesn't sound like any situation I've heard of before (connecting an account wiping out existing data). What I believe they should have done next is walk through the same steps you've done, with you trying to connect the account again, to verify that you're doing everything correctly and to try to pinpoint what is causing the data to be deleted. (This should be safe to do because you can always refer to the backup file.) 

Al6402

Thank you very much for responding.

So how do I communicate my concerns to somebody at Quicken so they could see if it is as bad a bug as I think it is?

jacobs

Al, for better or worse, your path is through Quicken Support. If you get someone who isn't helpful, as in your first experience, you can politely move to fairly quickly end the call. And then you try again and hope the next person you get is better. Or you could call and ask to speak to a Level 2 Support representative; they don't offer this without going through troubleshooting with you first, but I think if you say you've already had two calls with Support but still have a problem with data loss, you might be able to get switched to someone (or an appointment scheduled for a call-back). 

Your goal is to get someone screen share with you and have you walk through the steps you've done twice resulting in data loss. Hopefully they can see it, verify that something unexpected is happening, and collect whatever data they need to create an internal support ticket for the development team to investigate. 

In other instances, you could use the Report a Problem feature on the Quicken Help menu to report a bug. But that's a one-way flow of information; they don't respond to submissions, so you don't know if they understand your submission or can verify/reproduce it. And in this case, you have a complex issue which seems to be fairly unique to you, so the odds that they would be able to reproduce it based on just your description of the issue is quite small. So I wouldn't recommend that (unless a Support representative tells you to use it as a way to transmit your log files to them for investigation.)