Time stamping on downloaded transactions is wrong

Dr_B

I am reconciling my US bank account while in Australia. The automatically downloaded transaction data from Wells Fargo appears in Quicken Mac as occurring 1 day later than the entries on my bank statement. This makes reconciliation troublesome because interest is posted on the last day of the month and the balance is shown as the last day of the month on the statements but the transactions in Quicken appear 1 day later.

I have tried manually changing the dates of the transactions to agree with the bank statement, but in the reconciliation window the modified transactions do not appear, i.e. the interest posted on 30 June (I have manually changed the date in the register from the automatically downloaded 1 July back to 30 June to match the bank statement) does not appear in the reconciliation window for which I have entered 30 June and the balance from the bank statement.

I'm on the other side of the international date line from California and I suspect that Quicken is not reflecting my manual correction of a downloaded transaction in the reconciliation window.

Dr_B

It seems to me that if I am on holiday and travelling overseas, Quicken should not worry about where I am on the planet at the time I download transactions and reconcile my account. It seems bizarre that this happens. But I don't know how the bank feed data is formatted and what assumptions Quicken is making with regards to the timestamping of the data.

I have downloaded the transactions independently from Wells Fargo as a qfx file and inspected the file to confirm that the transaction dates are the same as appear on the bank statement. This implies to me that Quicken is manipulating the data based on the computer's location rather than simply passing the date from the bank through to the database.

This wouldn't bother me except for that it has implications for completing taxes because it suggests to me that any income or expense occurring on the last day of a financial year will not appear correctly in reports.

Jon

Reconciliation uses the posted date of the transaction; this isn't displayed by default but you can add it to the register if you customize he column selection.

I haven't seen any indication that reports use the posted date, at least not the ones I use - I don't have any issue with transactions occurring around the last/first day of the month showing up on the wrong monthly report even though I do sometimes have a similar issue during reconciliation.

jacobs

There's a simple way around this: enter the reconciliation statement ending date as one day later (e.g. July 1 instead of June 30). This will make the transactions dated June 30 but posted July 1 show up in the reconciliation window. If you have any actual July transactions which show up, just make sure they are unchecked in the reconciliation window. 

Dr_B

Thank you for the suggestions for a workaround. I was unaware of the use of the posted date for reconciliation. I have added the posted date to the columns displayed and found that I cannot edit the posted date.

I had tried the adding one day to the statement date for reconciliation purposes - it worked as expected.

But, I maintain this is a bug in Quicken that should be fixed. Quicken does not accurately reflect the date information provided by the bank.

I have just pored over a qfx file to confirm this. Every transaction has a single date associated with it. Here's one:
<DTPOSTED>20221006110000.000[-7:PDT]
In Quicken the corresponding transaction from the online download shows the posted date and the transaction date as 07-10-2022 12:00. {My system is set to dd-mm-yyyy date format}. I have confirmed this is the case for the 15 most recent transactions.

Here in Eastern Australia the local time (we have daylight savings now) is UTC + 11 whereas on the west coast of the US it is UTC-7. I reckon Quicken is trying to be too clever by half and adding 18 h to the timestamp from the bank and then embedding this in the local Quicken database as the posted time. If I'm right, then the solution would appear to be to not perform the date arithmetic and just store the datetime stamp from the bank as provided by the bank.

by the way - I'm curious to learn exactly what the timestamp format is. The obvious bit is the yyyymmdd (ISO 8601 standard without the hyphens) but I'm struggling with the 110000.000. I'm guessing hhmmss.sss? But this doesn't quite mesh with the Quicken display that always shows the time as 12:00.