Character limitations or BUG for downloaded transactions?

CowanInc

On my bank website a transaction appears as 2 lines.

WITHDRAWAL
CPPWDRAWAL AMER ELECT PWR 0235400704

This same transaction appears in the Downloaded Transaction section of Quicken as
WITHDRAWAL / CPPWDRAWAL AMER ELECT PWR
Indicating that those characters before the / will appear in the payee field and those after will appear in the memo section. I get all that.

The problem I have is, Quicken does not pull the additional "0235400704". This is critical for me since I have 8 power accounts on auto-draft. 8 transactions like this all on the same day and the only distinction for me is the account number that appears at the end of the text string, and Quicken doesn't pull in that number.

The Memo field in Quicken supports 64 characters from my testing.
The Payee field in Quicken also supports 64 characters.
The character count for the text string on the bank site is 47
The character count for what appears in the Downloaded Transaction section of Quicken, including the slash and spaces is 50.

I can't create renaming rules to deal with these 8 power account transactions when the text pulled is identical for each one. I've looked through Preferences with no results. Am I missing something? Any suggestions?

Quicken Jasmine

Hello @CowanInc,

Thank you for contacting the Quicken Community, though I do apologize that you are experiencing this issue with the details of your transactions. 

First, I suggest creating a test file and adding the account(s) to see if it produces the same issue with the details of the transaction It is recommended to save a backup before proceeding with troubleshooting steps in the event that you would like to return to your original starting position. Below are instructions on how to create a test file:

1. Choose File menu > New Quicken File.

1. Select New Quicken File.

1. Click OK.
2. In the File name field, enter the name of the new file, then click Save. Use a name like "Test File" to tell it apart from your main file. 

Don't use any of these characters: * ? < > | " : \ / (asterisk, question mark, left and right-angle bracket, pipe, straight quotation marks, colon, BACKSLASH, FORWARD SLASH). Also, don't add the .qdf extension; Quicken does that for you.

1. Sign in with your Quicken ID. If you are prompted to create a Quicken ID but already have one, click Sign In under the Create Account prompt. 

1. Select to not use Mobile.
2. Click Add Account to start adding accounts to the new file.

After adding accounts, see if you are experiencing the same problems in this test file. 

Please let me know how this goes, I look forward to hearing your response. 

UKR

In Quicken, a pair of download log files, OFX Log and Cloud Sync Log, contain a record of the actual (raw) transmitted data every time you perform a One Step Update. It would be interesting to see what is actually transmitted. Newest transactions are at the bottom of the log file

If you don't know how to do look up the log files using Quicken, please call Quicken Support on the phone and request help.  Let them do a screen share session with you to review the situation on your computer, to determine the nature of the problem and to figure out how to fix it.

OTOH ... these transactions appear to be monthly scheduled payments. As a workaround, or if it's not possible to fix the problem, how about setting up and recording Scheduled Reminder Transactions, one for each power account and entering these reminders BEFORE due date, before the withdrawals appear in your checking account?
Use distinct payee names, e.g. "AMER ELECT PWR {0235400704}", "AMER ELECT PWR {1234567890}", etc.

When downloading, Quicken should be able to match the downloaded transactions to the existing register transactions without a problem.

CowanInc

To UKR:
Concerning the actual downloaded files. Yes I had already thought of that. The downloaded file does indeed truncate the text after PWR.

<NAME>WITHDRAWAL<MEMO>CPPWDRAWAL AMER ELECT PWR</STMTTRN>

Yes these 8 accounts are on Auto Draft for monthly payments. As for your suggestion about the Scheduled transactions That would seem a logical solution except for the fact that Quicken can not match a transaction that it truncates before the account number.

Would love to get support from Quicken but I'll spend 2 hours going through useless basic t-shooting such as creating a test file. If the downloaded file truncates the text after certain number of characters, as my testing shows, then they waste my time.

In reviewing all the different downloaded transaction files, and I have plenty to compare, the most characters I can find in the memo area is 30.

If I download the same transaction into a CSV file all the txt is included.

UKR

Matching of downloaded transactions does not necessarily need the biller's account number to perform a match. A correct amount will do, too.

If you're not already doing so, I would recommend that you do not allow Quicken to automatically add downloaded transactions into this account register. Review and manually match downloaded transactions to the ones you created from scheduled reminders. That should get rid of all problems ... I hope ...