Chase EWC+ ... A method that "appears" to work.

anemicscarecrow

1) Write down opening balance for all chase accounts and number of transactions
2) Deactivate all chase accounts (Account list - Edit - Online Services)
3) Add account (from online services) - after authorizing from the Chase web site, make sure the accounts are Link to Existing and to the correct existing account
4) Wait for the process to run through (appeared to hang, but eventually finished)
5) When the window appears with the downloaded transactions, do not accept them. Delete them by selecting the first transaction, scroll to the last and Shift-Click, then hit the delete button.
6) Go back to each account and set the opening balance to the one you wrote down in step one.

That "appears" for now to have worked for me.

Before you do any of this, make a backup, label it pre-conversion, and keep it - just in case.

anemicscarecrow

I forgot to add - check to make sure the number of transactions match what you wrote down.

splasher

I suggest a change to #1.

Besides writing down the Opening Balance, put that amount into the Memo field of that transaction.  That way you have it for future reference as Quicken has had a tendency to change them if an account is reset.

rpgarrett75703

Even with doing all of that the process is still broken. I continue to get old transactions downloaded that have already been cleared and reconciled. When you first make the conversion about 90 days' worth of transactions will get downloaded even those accounts have been linked. Deleting them rather than accepting them does not prevent them from downloading again in the future. Today, after performing an OSU, those same transactions downloaded again to my Chase credit card account. I would try accepting them and deleting the originals but there are just too many and I don't feel like spending hours cleaning up the mess.

Haapy

FYI
I sent a Message to the President  in the Quicken home page reiterating all the Chase problems and referenced the 2 main threads in the Community Forum.
The reply was all is working just follow the instructions.

Draw your own conclusions. 

Chris_QPW

rpgarrett75703 said:

Deleting them rather than accepting them does not prevent them from downloading again in the future. 

That is incorrect with maybe the exception of a corrupted data file.

Every transactions downloaded has an unique Id that Quicken stores per account and if it sees a transaction with that unique Id again it will ignore it.

Now when changing over from Direct Connect to Express Web Connect + the unique Ids for the transactions have changed and so this system will not prevent from getting duplicates at this point, but it certainly should prevent future duplicates.  Quicken stores/checks for the unique Id even if you delete it.

Note also I have found that the Quicken developers did put in code to try to prevent duplicates even for the case of changing over from Direct Connect/Express Web Connect to Express Web Connect +, but for some people/some transactions it isn't working right for some reason, and so you can get duplicates.

And in some cases people are even reporting that it has trashed their transactions removing categories and such.  If something is happening to someone then my suggestion would be to avoid linking to the existing accounts, therefore not have Quicken doing things in that account.  That will result in new accounts, but then you can use a procedure like this to move any missing transaction from the old account to the new one.
FAQ: How Do I Move Transactions Between Quicken Accounts? — Quicken

Whether linking the accounts or going with new accounts and merging is more difficult will depending on just what happens in a given individual's accounts.  In my case of testing this there were just a few duplicates in my checking and savings accounts and no duplicates or other problems in my credit card accounts, but it is very clear by all the reports that this can vary wildly between different users/data files.

anemicscarecrow

I have processed the one step update several times and it has not brought back in the duplicate transactions. The real test will be tomorrow when it brings in some actual new transactions. Categories seem unaffected; I have compared the YTD through August category summaries to the spreadsheet I update each month and there are no differences. So far so good. Tomorrow should tell me a lot more.

anemicscarecrow

Wow. Putting the opening balance in the memo field -- genius. I just went and did that.

DRMick

Haapy said:

FYI
I sent a Message to the President  in the Quicken home page reiterating all the Chase problems and referenced the 2 main threads in the Community Forum.
The reply was all is working just follow the instructions.

Draw your own conclusions. 

Reminds me of the WWII submarine story when the American torpedo detonators did not work. The captains kept telling their fleet admirals and the Weapons Bureau in Wash DC said it the torpedos were working as designed, it wasn't their problem.   

rpgarrett75703

I can only report my experience. I don't believe I have any data corruption. I never had this problem with Direct Connect after I deactivated/reactivated an account. Do you know where these transaction ID's are stored? Is there any way to actually verify that the transactions ID's for these deleted transactions are actually getting stored? There are 2 ways to delete these duplicates: first, when they are first downloaded and appear in the list of downloaded transactions. This is where I have deleted them from so they never were actually entered in the register. The second way is to accept them and have them entered in your register and then deleting them from the register. Do you think these 2 ways of deleting duplicates are treated the same way in Quicken with regards to how it manages these transaction ID's? I didn't mean to imply these duplicates are downloaded every day. But periodically they will download, and I can't explain why. I've had zero problems with Quicken in the past. Only after converting to EWC+ have these issues cropped up. I still maintain a Direct Connect version of my Quicken file which I'm keeping until I'm forced to permanently convert to EWC+.

Ps56k2

Chris_QPW said:  Every transaction downloaded has an unique ID that Quicken stores per account and if it sees a transaction with that unique ID again it will ignore it.

What about the scenario where they are downloaded - BUT not Accepted, and just Deleted -
there would be nothing to compare on the next download.... so - groundhog day -
unless the ID is stored as the transactions are downloaded and not part of the history in the Register.

Chris_QPW

Ps56k2 said:

Chris_QPW said:  Every transaction downloaded has an unique ID that Quicken stores per account and if it sees a transaction with that unique ID again it will ignore it.

What about the scenario where they are downloaded - BUT not Accepted, and just Deleted -
there would be nothing to compare on the next download.... so - groundhog day -
unless the ID is stored as the transactions are downloaded and not part of the history in the Register.

Accepting transaction or not have nothing to do with it. Quicken stores the unique Ids no matter what you do.

Think about it, would it make any sense for a transaction you just deleted in the Downloaded Transactions tab to again show up there tomorrow when you updated again?

rpgarrett75703 said:

I can only report my experience. I don't believe I have any data corruption. I never had this problem with Direct Connect after I deactivated/reactivated an account. Do you know where these transaction ID's are stored? Is there any way to actually verify that the transactions ID's for these deleted transactions are actually getting stored? There are 2 ways to delete these duplicates: first, when they are first downloaded and appear in the list of downloaded transactions. This is where I have deleted them from so they never were actually entered in the register. The second way is to accept them and have them entered in your register and then deleting them from the register. Do you think these 2 ways of deleting duplicates are treated the same way in Quicken with regards to how it manages these transaction ID's? I didn't mean to imply these duplicates are downloaded every day. But periodically they will download, and I can't explain why. I've had zero problems with Quicken in the past. Only after converting to EWC+ have these issues cropped up. I still maintain a Direct Connect version of my Quicken file which I'm keeping until I'm forced to permanently convert to EWC+.

I can envision one way where this might happen and not be data file corruption.

Direct Connect and Express Web Connect + (and maybe even Express Web Connect) have different unique Ids.  So, one would expect that when changing over from one connection method to another that since the unique Ids changed that you would get duplicate transactions.

Note that this all depends on who is creating the unique Id and if they keep them consistent or not.
With Direct Connect it is always the financial institution generating these, but with Express Web Connect it can be either the financial institution or Intuit.  If the Downloaded Ids have Intuit in front of them you know where they are coming from and they certainly won't be the same.  I'm pretty sure that with Direct Connect and Express Web Connect (and Web Connect/QFX file for that matter) on Chase they all come from Chase and are consistent.  I don't know if with Express Web Connect + if it is the financial institution or Intuit that is generating them, but they are VERY different.  See this Discussion I created:
https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7919194/goals-and-realty-dont-meet-here-no-automatic-way-to-do-chase-conversion

If you look at that discussion early on I just did the test in a new data file without any linking, and you can see the difference in the Downloaded Ids.

Later I bit the decided that since decided when this is final I would just stop using Quicken and as such what was a couple of weeks if it trashed every, I went through the recommended procedure.

I had better results than a lot of people reporting problems (not perfect, but easily fixed).
But the most important thing to note in the testing is that in fact I didn't get a large number of duplicates even though clearly the downloaded Ids have changed.

That means that Quicken is coded to do something to try to block the duplicates even if the unique Ids are now different.

In that testing I did run multiple updates and never had "more duplicates".  But what if whatever they did to "suppress" the duplicates during the conversion somehow went wrong?  Then maybe on the next update you could get 60 to 90 days of duplicates.  And this is all guesswork.  But even in that case what I would expect is that once those duplicates are deleted that you wouldn't get them again.

And like I said above.  It might be more work at the start, but more "known" if one didn't link the existing accounts and then just dealt with them while merging the old account into the new one.

To answer the question of where the unique Ids are stored, the simple answer is in your data file.  And they are "grouped" by account.  That is why if you deactivate an account for downloading and add a new account and activate it for downloading it will get transactions for the last 90 days or such.

There is another setting that might control this, but I think it only works for Direct Connect and only after the first download (for the first download they set the DTSTART to a really old date, and let the financial institution decide how far back to the transactions should be.

If you go into Tools -> Online Services and select Chase.  And the hold down Ctrl+Shift and select Contact Info, this dialog comes up.


You can select the account in question and the Reset DTSTART and put in a date.
If you look in the OFX protocol/logs you will find that this is the requested start date sent to the financial institution for the transactions.  Quicken usually sets this date to a couple of weeks before the last download you did, and relies on the Downloaded Id to filter off the duplicates.

One might thing that Quicken should set this to the date that the download happens, but note you could miss transactions/have duplicates since it is only accurate to a day.  But even more important even though the OFX standard says this should only be a hint at what transaction are downloaded some of the financial institution used it as a strict cutoff date.  The "hint" part of it was for the pending transaction case.  Again there were financial institutions that would "post transactions" with the original date that they got the transactions, but only after it was actually posted.  Resulting in a date that was a few days in the past.

Anyways I don't think DTSTART applies to Express Web Connect or Express Web Connect +.

Chris_QPW

P.S. The long answer to where the unique Ids are stored is in the .QEL "file" inside the Quicken data file.  This is an internal file in the "compressed" QFX file.  It can be viewed (but not edited) using 7-Zip (which is free to use):


But the exact storage location really doesn't matter as much as "how it performs"/how Quicken uses it.

Chris_QPW

BTW now that I think of it I would add a couple steps to the original suggested steps.
Download and reconcile all your accounts/transactions before starting, and do a backup at that point.

rpgarrett75703

Thanks for the information regarding DTSTART. I just checked my Direct Connect version of my Quicken file. I have 4 Chase accounts: Checking, Plus Savings, Premier Savings, Credit card. Each of these has a DTSTART value of 9/12/2022 which is today. Earlier today without making any changes to this Quicken file I made a copy and converted it to EWC+. After the conversion I deleted the duplicate downloaded transactions and reset the Opening Balance of the Checking and Credit Card accounts. After that both files were perfectly in sync. I checked the DTSTART value for these 4 accounts in my EWC+ file. Each account had a different DTSTART value: Checking (9/9/2022), Plus Savings (8/9/2022), Premier Savings (8/15/2022), Credit card (9/7/2022). I was surprised that they were all different. I'm not sure what it all means. You said that DTSTART most likely doesn't apply to EWC+ but for the heck of it I reset the DTSTART value of these 4 accounts to 9/12/2022 to match my Direct Connect version. I have no knowledge whatsoever of the internal workings of Quicken so I can't say whether this will have any impact or not. At this point my EWC+ file is just for testing purposes until I'm forced to switch to EWC+. I will continue to monitor the behavior of my EWC+ file and report any changes. Thanks.

Chris_QPW

Hmm, just checked my Direct Connect accounts and see that they are all set to 9/12/2022 (today) also.  I guess the stopped setting that date into the past for the financial institutions that post transaction into the past and using the DTSTART date as an absolute cutoff date.

Interesting that the dates are all different for Express Web Connect +.  I wonder if they line up with the last date there were transactions in each of those accounts.

But in truth the Downloaded Id should take care of most of this except that it might be a bit faster for downloading if the financial institution only sends the data range needed, which is what DTSTART is really for.