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81 Days to go, to limited support.

Chris_QPW

I just check my subscription and it has 81 days left.

I'm almost positive that I'm going to let it expire, and of course after that point I will be more limited on what questions I can check on, answer.

This has nothing to do with paying for a subscription, and everything to do with the fact that the use of Quicken isn't really something I need any more.

In fact, I bought a new retail Quicken subscription a few months ago on sale before Chase dropped Direct Connect and I came to this conclusion. I will probably post that activation code in this thread for some lucky person that sees and uses it first.

I might also just switch over to my Starter edition subscription that I get with TurboTax. Might even be a good idea for those questions about its limitations.

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Comments

TTSguy

I will not be far behind you. Looking forward to you doing some work into using the Qkn Category/Tab feature (in Category Column) with Starter and the in's and out's of using that feature in Quicken starter.
Thanks for the great job you did with Quicken in the past!

NotACPA

@Chris_QPW Doesn't this announcement also indicate that you won't be able to download, and store, the program updates any more?

THAT would be a serious loss to the community, as great as the loss of your advice here.

Chris_QPW

NotACPA said:

@Chris_QPW Doesn't this announcement also indicate that you won't be able to download, and store, the program updates any more?
THAT would be a serious loss to the community, as great as the loss of your advice here.

No, at least not for now. Note that you can never capture the automatically downloaded patches, so the fact that I won't be able to get patches in that way or apply them to my Quicken doesn't affect me getting patches and storing them on my website. Those come from the manual patch webpage.

Chris_QPW

65 Days to go, and a few days ago I figured why not do the conversion on my "real data file" and get it back up to date just to see how it would go. These are my observations so far. And note I have automatic transaction entry mode on, so if that is off there might have been different results.

For a change I think have experienced about all the different failures you can get in this process, with one notable one.

Note this is for Chase, and that it includes having a checking, savings, two credit card accounts and various IRA accounts over two login accounts. From what I have read it looks like Bank of America didn't convert their investment accounts. That might make Chase the only financial institution that has all of its account types using Express Web Connect +. Note I don't have any loan accounts, which is lucky since I don't think they convert correctly from what I have seen (not surprising for the downloaded loan accounts).

First off when you start the reauthorize process and get to the Chase site it will list both the non-investment accounts and the investment accounts, but no matter what you select on the Chase site it will only do either the non-investment or the investment accounts at a time. And it seems that you always have to do the non-investment accounts first. Also, when you come back and do the investment accounts you should not link the non-investment accounts even though that is what it defaults too. You should instead select not to add them. There was a bug where linking the non-investment accounts again in the step where you are reauthorizing your investment accounts/linking them it will change the financial institution name from "Chase" to "Chase Investments - New".

BTW interesting quirk. I have a Chase savings account that has zero in it. Given the lack of any real interest there isn't any reason to keep anything in it, but to close it I have to go there, can't do it online, and I haven't got around to doing that. Well, that account never shows up on the Chase site for reauthorizing.

Now I'm going to state that I believe was the intended process for converting over from Direct Connect (or Express Web Connect) to Express Web Connect +, and why I think in a way it was over engineered and has led to about as many problems as it has fixed.

It is well known that if you change connect types and the transaction unique Id changes you are going to get duplicates. It is clear to me that Quicken Inc put in place a process to try to match up the existing transactions and avoid these duplicates. Personally, I have dealt with duplicates in the past and they aren't that hard do find and delete, so trying to eliminate them and only doing a "90%" job isn't a good choice in my book.

I didn't see the famous changing of the opening balance transaction, but I did see a couple of other nasty fallouts of this process. The first weren't too hard to deal with. There were a lot of transactions that were duplicates that showed up as if they were manually entered. As in they didn't have the New/New Match status and they didn't merge with any existing transaction. Note I didn't do this conversion for a long time and as such there were plenty of new transactions which mostly got the New status. Also note that I did see a lot of transactions that were merged with the old ones correctly. I'm not exactly sure why these didn't. Oh yeah, one more thing about these transactions, they were marked reconciled.

And then for the second problem, this had to do with the transfers for paying the credit cards. What do is have a reminder that goes into the register and then it is matched. The reminder is set for the day that the payment goes into the credit card account, which is a day or two before it shows up on in the checking account. What happened is for every one of these transfers back to August is that they got duplicated with the posting date instead of the date that the reminder was put in. These were really hard to find because they were also marked reconciled.

The bottom line is that anyone without a rigorous reconcile process in place would have a mess on their hands that they probably would never figure out.

Interesting enough the investment accounts did much better. It might be partly because I have such a simple portfolio, just three ETF and I during this period of time I just bought some more and got dividends (in cash).

Now on to my wife's accounts. This proved to be quite the challenge. It is really interesting because I had no real problem when this was done in a new data file, and I created new accounts.

So, we share the banking accounts, and credit card accounts, and one Joint investment account. And then we each have a Traditional IRA and a Roth IRA. So clearly, I didn't want to duplicate/repeat linking in the shared accounts, just link her accounts.

I go through the process for these accounts, get all the way to linking them and then select to go on. There is a dialog selects between simple investing mode and complete investing mode and to select Next. Well, selecting Next did nothing. So, I cancel back to the dialog where you link accounts and had to play with it for a long time to figure out how to get past that dialog.

It seems that there isn't any possible way link just investment accounts. What I ended up doing is first reauthorizing the checking account, creating a new account. Then doing the investment accounts. And deleting the duplicate checking account.

I should also mention that when I did my accounts, and I did the investment accounts, Quicken created a new Checking account. It was just an empty manual entry account that I deleted, but it is consistent in that it insists on creating this account when only reauthorizing investment accounts.

Now move forward a few days. Things seemed be working, but I'm highly suspicious of the process. In the mornings the update takes a very long time, and later updates are fast. It seems that something is caching the information and not doing the whole process for at least some amount of time.

Then I noticed that people are reporting that the Last download information wasn't being updated. And I saw the same thing, it had a date back to when I did the conversion. So, as a test I removed the runtime.dat file and of course this clear that information. Then I did updates, and this information never came back, which BTW includes stating the connection type at the top left of the register.

Next test, I logged out of my Quicken Id and back in, and then did a One Step Update. And it proceeded to mark all of Express Web Connect and Express Web Connect + accounts (but not my one Direct Connect account) as closed/deleted.

I ended up resetting each of the accounts, which also triggered reauthorizing of each of the Express Web Connect + accounts. This fixed the "closed/deleted" account symbols and it also downloaded new transactions. Note that I had downloaded this morning before doing any of this and didn't get any of these new transactions. I conclude by that I was also in the state where not all the transactions are being downloaded properly.

What's more I looked at the details of each account and all of the banking/credit cards are set to "Chase" for the financial institution, but really strange so are my investment accounts. But my wife's investment accounts are still using "Chase Investments - New".

On top of all of this the One Step Update "settings" changed. When I first reauthorized the settings had the account numbers in these lines:

As you can see now, they aren't there. This is different since I logged out of the Quicken Id and back in and reset all the accounts.

OK, just ran a One Step Update and the Downloaded transaction date/time did update.
I wonder about if my investment accounts will properly update given that they are now set with the financial institution of "Chase" and not "Chase Investments - New".

Chris_QPW

OK, move on a couple days. I updated late Sunday night. This is in fact at terrible time to update because the financial institutions tend to have things down for maintenance. And sure enough it caused errors. But the kinds of errors it caused aren't the kind that should have happened. It should have been some temporary errors. Instead, this is what I got:

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/6031128/uploads/editor/yf/srk562t3hozo.jpg

These symbols mean that Quicken has lost the connection to the online accounts and reported them as deleted. Note that the Macy's credit card account went into this state too. It is Express Web Connect, not Express Web Connect +. To me that means that the error handling of Quicken has gotten worse since I stopped updating this account years ago. Before it or my Synchrony account which was also Express Web Connect would give problems about every two months, but never would they be reported as deleted.

Note that none of the Chase investment accounts went into this mode. And the Synchrony account didn't either.

The "recovery" for the Macy's card was to Reset the connection. Which kicked off prompting for the username password and relinking the online account to the one in Quicken.

Doing the same for the Chase accounts triggers the reauthorization process (for all the accounts).

Chris_QPW

Just downloaded and got an indicator that there were transactions in my investment account.
I go there and there are none (and there shouldn't be any). To me it looks like the syncing to the Quicken Cloud dataset is setting the flag that there are new transactions but Quicken is ignoring them because they aren't new.

Chris_QPW

I'm going to post this now even though it in fact happened in between some of the problems I documented above. I purposely didn't put in because I wanted to see if the problem would come back.
This actually happened before the Sunday event documented above.

People mentioned that the Last Download information wasn't updating.

And I noticed that was true for my accounts where the date was two days old.

I removed the runtime.dat file and sure enough, the information was completely gone and no matter how many times I updated it didn't come back.

So, my first attempt at fixing it was to remove the Quicken Cloud dataset.

That didn't seem to work.

Next, I logged out of my Quicken Id and back in. When I updated all the non-investment accounts threw the error that it looked like the online accounts had been deleted and I needed to fix them. I then Reset the connection, which lead to reauthorizing the Chase accounts. And sure enough, I got the transactions.

It has been a few days and the Last Download and transactions, and online balances are all correct now.

Also, a new event.

Up until yesterday the updating of the Express Web Connect (+) accounts were taking quite a long time. I would say at least 10 times as longer as they did with Direct Connect. But as of now they are updating much faster. The updating of my Citi Cards/Direct Connect account still beats the Express Web Connect (+) accounts, but not by too much. The Citi credit card is about 2 seconds, and other accounts are about 5 seconds.

Chris_QPW

Well, it is back to being slow, but still working. I guess the Quicken Cloud dataset/Server was caching the results and not really updating at the financial institutions.

For me everything was fine up until a few months ago. Transactions sporadically stopped downloading for days or weeks with various accounts. Which means I have to login to the FIs to see if/what I am missing, troubleshoot, reset accounts, etc. I simply don't trust the accuracy of the program anymore. With the mobile Apps that FI's offer (not thru Quicken) with instantaneous facial login, I can access multiple accounts in less time than Quicken's OSU, and with accuracy. My subscription is good for another year and if things don't improve there is no reason to put further effort into this. And that is a shame.

Chris_QPW

Well, the end of the month has rolled by and I noticed something interesting with my investment accounts.
I haven’t updated in a couple of days and did so on Dec 1st during the early evening. I got one dividend transaction in each of my registers. I compared to shares and said the agree. Then used the “Update Cash Balance” dialog to check on what it thought the online cash balance was and it was wrong. So, I went online and checked it at Chase and sure enough it was wrong there too. One needs to know that Chase sweeps money in an out of “cash accounts” for various reasons like buys/sells/dividends/interest …. Basically it was in a state where the dividend was paid and the dividend transaction downloads, but the “sweeping” was in an inconsistent state. This is the first time I have seen behavior like this my Vanguard accounts used to do the same thing after the close of the day with transactions, but wouldn’t include them in the “balance” until late at night. In the case of Vanguard this included the reporting number of shares, but in the case of Chase it is only the cash balance. The same thing happens late at night say 10PM PST the cash balance was correct.