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Canadian mortgage is shown in USD

stasvolik

Hi, everybody.
In my Quicken (version R40.28, Build 27.1.40.28) I just noticed that my Canadian mortgage is now shown as "USD" account. When I try to record payment, it asks for a confirmation to convert the currency of the payment. Needless to say, this account was created as CAD account and I had no problems with it in the past.
How can I correct this issue?
Thank you,
Stas.

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Arctic Hare

stasvolik said:

Hi, everybody.
In my Quicken (version R40.28, Build 27.1.40.28) I just noticed that my Canadian mortgage is now shown as "USD" account. When I try to record payment, it asks for a confirmation to convert the currency of the payment. Needless to say, this account was created as CAD account and I had no problems with it in the past.
How can I correct this issue?
Thank you,
Stas.

@stasvolik Firstly, your Quicken version is quite far out of date. The current Canadian version is R45.18 and there have been a few versions in between: https://www.quicken.com/support/quicken-windows-release-notes

I recommend you update to the latest version (R45.18).

As for your specific issue, please respond indicating whether the mortgage is "connected" to an online account using either Web Connect or Express Web Connect and, if so, with which Financial Institution.

stasvolik

@Arctic Hare Thank you for your response. I will update Quicken. The mortgage is connected to Scotia using Express Web Connect.

Arctic Hare

stasvolik said:

@Arctic Hare Thank you for your response. I will update Quicken. The mortgage is connected to Scotia using Express Web Connect.

I highly recommend against connecting mortgages as that has the potential to cause a range of issues. That being said, there is a presently a wide spread issue with connected accounts specifically with Scotia Bank that causes this currency miss-match issue. You cannot correct the currency issue yourself as long as the account is connected to an online account. The reason for this is that the currency setting code is included in every download from the financial institution - and Scotia Bank is presently sending the wrong code for some accounts, which is impacting many people. Furthermore, once an account is connected to an online account, the currency setting in Quicken is locked so that it cannot be changed by the user. This is necessary because the account in Quicken has to have the same currency as the online account. That generally works well, except in two circumstances and one of those circumstances is when the financial institution is sending the wrong <CURDEF> code in the download metadata.

I use Express Web Connect for my bank accounts and credit cards, but avoid using it for mortgages.

I highly recommend you use the "Submit A Problem" in quicken (See the Help Menu) and submit the problem to Quicken Tech Support. They are aware of the issue, but need more users to Submit A Problem so that they can identify the issue. Be sure to include as many details as you can when you Submit A Problem.

stasvolik

Thank you for the explanation. I've deactivated the download connection (it never worked anyway, as far as I could tell) and reported a problem to Quicken. I will see what I can do to correct it - maybe redo the mortgage account in Quicken. I've also reported a problem.
Cheers,
Stas.

Arctic Hare

stasvolik said:

Thank you for the explanation. I've deactivated the download connection (it never worked anyway, as far as I could tell) and reported a problem to Quicken. I will see what I can do to correct it - maybe redo the mortgage account in Quicken. I've also reported a problem.
Cheers,
Stas.

Yes, you are going to have to recreate the mortgage in Quicken to fix the currency issue; however, what you can do is recreate the mortgage and then move all the transactions from the old account (now locked to USD) to a new account (in CAD). Quicken won't let you change the currency of an account that contains transactions. Another option would be to temporarily move all of the transactions out of that account into a new temp account, reset the currency (which I believe you will be able to do when there are no transactions in the account) and then move the transactions back when you have fixed the currency.

You could contact Quicken Support and get them to walk you through the fix for the currency issue. It would be good for them to appreciate the inconvenience caused by this issue. And, they might save you from creating some bigger problem in the process.

Quicken has never got Canadian mortgages quite right. Mortgage interest is generally calculated differently in Canada than it is in the US and the interest model in Quicken (both US and Canadian versions) is US centric - as with so many aspects of Quicken. Quicken Canada is incapable of correctly calculating the interest on my mortgage because there is no option to configure it correctly for such. The best I can get is to approximate the calculation, but it will always be somewhat wrong. Quicken Canada is not really Canadian in many senses; it has many components that don't properly reflect how things work (differently) in Canada than the US.

While I generally seek to achieve perfect accuracy in financial/accounting software, I long ago gave up on trying to track my Canadian mortgage with perfect accuracy in Canadian Quicken. It would take a lot more effort than it is worth to correct each interest amount in each payment to be perfectly correct.

I was even more frustrated with the mortgage tracking when my mortgage was with RBC Royal Bank because it is actually difficult to get a report from RBC that shows

smayer97

Actually, one method that has worked for some to correct the currency issue is to use a QFX download and manually manipulate the currency code in the file and loading that file. That should change the currency back without having to recreate the account.

See: https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7798296/quicken-has-changed-the-currency-of-some-of-my-canadian-bank-accounts-to-usd-symbol-but-the-amount/p1

YMMV.

Arctic Hare

smayer97 said:

Actually, one method that has worked for some to correct the currency issue is to use a QFX download and manually manipulate the currency code in the file and loading that file. That should change the currency back without having to recreate the account.

See: https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7798296/quicken-has-changed-the-currency-of-some-of-my-canadian-bank-accounts-to-usd-symbol-but-the-amount/p1

YMMV.

I expect that editing the <CURDEF> would work here. It becomes a question of which approach the user is more comfortable with. Regardless, the best that one can hope for with modelling a mortgage in Quicken Canada is an approximation. Moving the transaction out, changing the currency setting in Quicken, and moving transactions back could also be done in less than 5 min. The user has a few options.

smayer97

Arctic Hare said:

... The user has a few options.

Yes, exactly :-)

grimmt1957

Arctic Hare: are you actually seeing Scotia Bank QFX files with <CURDEF> NOT set to "CAD"?

I haven't seen this on any of my downloaded files and all of my file imports retain a status of CAD currency.

However, if I touch Express Web Connect most (not all) of my Scotia Bank accounts immediately switch to USD.

Arctic Hare

I don't bank with Scotia Bank. I had experience with a <CURDEF> issue with RBC. The issue that I had - and still partly exists to day as a latent bug - only came into play with accounts that had no activity is transaction history window (30, 60, or 90 days). Evidently, the data feed for EWC contains a parameter that is different than the downloaded QFX. Quicken knows about this issue and claims to be working on it.

[edit] I think the main point here is that once a Quicken account contains any transactions, the user cannot change the currency setting; however, using Express Web Connect absolutely can change the currency setting of an account. You can't edit the data stream of EWC, so if you want to use EWC you'll need to wait for Quicken, Intuit, and/or the financial institution to fix the issue.

grimmt1957

Thanks Arctic Hare, your edit matches my take on the issue.

After transactions are posted, the currency cannot be changed manually.
For some reason, Quicken allows EWC to override the currency (with the incorrect value), and yet doesn't allow you the ability to correct it.

Chris_QPW

To me this a problem layered on a problem (and throw in another problem just for good measure).

First to the currency problems. Quicken Windows US would "handle" this problem differently. It rejects any download that isn't in USD. Now if assume that the Canadian version is actually at the heart the US version, you quickly see why they locked multiple currency on, and locked CAD as the home currency. Not a very good way of doing it in my opinion, but it would be "quick". That then extends to downloading of transactions. They open it up where they don't reject foreign currencies, but they also don't take the next step and block importing with a currency different than the one in the account. Again "quick", but not complete.

For whatever reason, Express Web Connect from RBC is getting USD in the download in certain circumstances, and so that leads to this problem.

As for Express Web Connect overriding things. This is something that some people don't really get, they see where something restricts the user from doing a bad thing and think that would prevent the Quicken code from doing it. That isn't going to be the case, the code can basically do anything it wants. That is what makes things like sync to Mobile/Web so dangerous. Most operations for Quicken "add" and so can be seen and removed pretty easily. Sync to Mobile/Web can literally change any transaction in your account without showing any indication of doing it, and that carries to the budget and memorized payees, and reminders these days.

And that brings me to the problematic downloading of loan accounts. Before it was implemented people asking for it figured it would work just like your checking account where the loan scheduler would put in a reminder and all that would be downloaded is the net amount and it would be matched.

But Intuit had another problem it wanted to solve. The loan scheduler didn't know all the different kinds of loan schedules that the financial institutions were creating. And in the case of the Canadian version I guess it didn't know any of the Canadian ways of scheduling. So, the way they implemented this is by "believing the financial institution". As in, the downloaded information provided everything, including the scheduling and Quicken "just believes it". Just fine if it is always correct, but of course it isn't. And because they couldn't think of any way to allow the user to fix this and stay in sync they hid the account register. This also becomes really problematic if the connection method changes. What usually happens in this case is that it is marked paid off when it hasn't been. And this happens from time to time when the connection method isn't changed. Needless to say, the US SuperUsers just recommend not using this download feature. But of course, this is based on the fact that for the most part the loan scheduler actually is correct for US loans.

Arctic Hare

Chris_QPW said:

To me this a problem layered on a problem (and throw in another problem just for good measure).

First to the currency problems. Quicken Windows US would "handle" this problem differently. It rejects any download that isn't in USD. Now if assume that the Canadian version is actually at the heart the US version, you quickly see why they locked multiple currency on, and locked CAD as the home currency. Not a very good way of doing it in my opinion, but it would be "quick". That then extends to downloading of transactions. They open it up where they don't reject foreign currencies, but they also don't take the next step and block importing with a currency different than the one in the account. Again "quick", but not complete.

For whatever reason, Express Web Connect from RBC is getting USD in the download in certain circumstances, and so that leads to this problem.

As for Express Web Connect overriding things. This is something that some people don't really get, they see where something restricts the user from doing a bad thing and think that would prevent the Quicken code from doing it. That isn't going to be the case, the code can basically do anything it wants. That is what makes things like sync to Mobile/Web so dangerous. Most operations for Quicken "add" and so can be seen and removed pretty easily. Sync to Mobile/Web can literally change any transaction in your account without showing any indication of doing it, and that carries to the budget and memorized payees, and reminders these days.

And that brings me to the problematic downloading of loan accounts. Before it was implemented people asking for it figured it would work just like your checking account where the loan scheduler would put in a reminder and all that would be downloaded is the net amount and it would be matched.

But Intuit had another problem it wanted to solve. The loan scheduler didn't know all the different kinds of loan schedules that the financial institutions were creating. And in the case of the Canadian version I guess it didn't know any of the Canadian ways of scheduling. So, the way they implemented this is by "believing the financial institution". As in, the downloaded information provided everything, including the scheduling and Quicken "just believes it". Just fine if it is always correct, but of course it isn't. And because they couldn't think of any way to allow the user to fix this and stay in sync they hid the account register. This also becomes really problematic if the connection method changes. What usually happens in this case is that it is marked paid off when it hasn't been. And this happens from time to time when the connection method isn't changed. Needless to say, the US SuperUsers just recommend not using this download feature. But of course, this is based on the fact that for the most part the loan scheduler actually is correct for US loans.

@Chris_QPW: This has been documented in detail elsewhere, but a quick recap here (at risk of being somewhat off topic to the OP)... There is an issue in the Canadian version where Express Web Connect causes problems if an account that is included in the download set has no transactions in the transaction history period for EWC (which is typically 90 days). One of the implications was (this is fixed now) that if you set up EWC for a bank card number and including an account that wasn't used often, if it ever came to pass that a CAD account hadn't been used in more than 90 days, running EWC would change the currency for that account in Quicken to USD. This was fixed a few years ago, so I might get particulars backwards from memory (I have both USD and CAD accounts), but I think it was the accounts that were really in CAD that would flip over to USD. So, lets say you opened a bank account for a child and you made no transactions in that account over a 3 month period, EWC would switch the currency in that account from CAD to USD. And, as already discussed, there was no easy way to get the currency back to CAD. The issue hasn't been completely fixed though. One runs into problems if you are setting up a new EWC connection and you include one or more accounts that have no transactions in the 90 day history window. Because of these issues with seldom used accounts, I now opt to leave those accounts out of my EWC/OSU setup. The disadvantage is that I won't have visibility of fraudulent activity on those accounts, but I've decided to accept that risk over the problems caused when there are no transactions in the 90 day window.

Chris_QPW

I wonder what information would be in the Quicken cloud sync log file for this particular problem. I noticed the lately this particular log file has some different information in it than I remember in the past. I'm not sure if it would be better for finding the problem or not.

Personally though I think if they had really properly implemented multiple currency downloads then there would be a lot less problems. For instance they absolutely should be blocking changing the currency after the transactions of a given currency is in account.

juched

Opened a ticket for this issue. My Scotiabank accounts keep getting messed up. This should be easy to fix. I have been waiting for over 6 months.

Arctic Hare

juched said:

Opened a ticket for this issue. My Scotiabank accounts keep getting messed up. This should be easy to fix. I have been waiting for over 6 months.

This appears to be a bank-caused issue and if that is the case then Quicken can only advise the bank of the issue. It is then up to the bank to address the issue. You might want to try petitioning your bank... although I acknowledge I've never had success with petitioning my financial institutions with similar issues. This is a long standing dilemma with Quicken, especially in Canada. In the US, some financial institutions support Direct Connect, a connection method that seems to have far fewer issues. For reasons that aren't entirely apparent, no Canadian financial institution supports the Direct Connect method; so, we are stuck with the less reliable Web Connect and Express Web Connect methods. And, when things go wrong like this, it can take a very long time to get them fixed. I've had some serious issues last more than a year before they have been resolved and one significant issue with Express Web Connect that was brought to Quicken's attention several years ago and it remains unaddressed. You are not alone in your frustration....