American Express High Yield Savings Account QFX Import Missing Memo / Description

beck.snelgrove

Hi,

I've spent a ton of time searching these forums for an answer and can't find a question or post addressing my exact issue. I have an AmEx credit card account, and a joint / linked AmEx High Yield Savings Account (HYSA). From reading forum posts, it's clear that currently, AmEx (the credit card issueing entity) DOES support Web Connect / Online integration to automatically download transaction information related to credit card activity.

AmEx (the HYSA banking entity) DOES NOT support this integration and doesn't seem to have plans to. To get around this, AmEx Savings can be treated as an offline account and you can download your transactions to a QFX file and import them to Quicken and track the account balances and spending in that way.

After many tries, I WAS able to successfully accomplish this, importing transaction dates, amounts, type (withdrawal/deposit), and balance. What DIDN'T come through was any transaction description or memo information. So while I was able to get the right balance into Quicken, it's not helping me track or measure spending without a lot of manual effort going back and adding memo info after each import.

Can anyone advise me if this is an AmEx issue, or if it's a QFX import issue? I suspect it's actually an AmEx issue, for the following reasons:

On the HYSA online account page, there are two options for downloading transactions, in a QFX file format and as a .CSV. When I change the format requested to a CSV and open that in excel, I get a reasonably formatted file with columns titled "Date, Description, Amount, Balance" pretty much everything I'm looking for to import.

When I open the QFX file in excel (or notepad, I just want a way to see the text / code that's in the file) it's definitely formatted in code to be imported by Quicken, but nowhere in the text of that QFX file is there any text strings matching the Descriptions that come in the CSV file. There's date strings, transaction type strings etc, but no text matching any descriptions.

So the QFX file gets imported to Quicken, but since AmEx's transaction download is missing the line item discription info, there's nothing to populate in the memo lines without manual imput each time.

Am I doing this wrong? Has anyone else run into this issue before? I did manage to submit a support ticket on AmEx's side as I actually suspect this is an issue with what data they're putting in the QFX file, but I thought it was worth writing this novel to confirm my assumptions here too. I've included an example of a transaction for the CSV and QFX file pulls for reference.

QFX Transaction Example.PNG

CSV Example.PNG

Chris_QPW

Well I think you have pretty much answered your own question, If the information isn't in the QFX file there isn't anything Quicken can do about it. The financial institutions exporting that QFX file would have to fix it.

For reference here is a transaction that has such information:

<STMTTRN>
<TRNTYPE>XFER
<DTPOSTED>20110211160000
<TRNAMT>9994.40
<FITID>20111102836000
<REFNUM>2559641518
<NAME>QUICK TRANSFER FROM BROKERAGE XX
<MEMO>Transfer-QUICK TRANSFER FROM BROKERAGE XXXX2435
</STMTTRN>Given how slow financial institutions are to work on such problems (you should certainly report it to them though) here is a workaround you can use my free program to convert the CSV file to a QFX file: https://www.quicknperlwiz.com/

To create a QFX file first do the column mapping and then enable the QFX export instead o QIF.

Chris_QPW

Well I think you have pretty much answered your own question, If the information isn't in the QFX file there isn't anything Quicken can do about it. The financial institutions exporting that QFX file would have to fix it.

For reference here is a transaction that has such information:

<STMTTRN>
<TRNTYPE>XFER
<DTPOSTED>20110211160000
<TRNAMT>9994.40
<FITID>20111102836000
<REFNUM>2559641518
<NAME>QUICK TRANSFER FROM BROKERAGE XX
<MEMO>Transfer-QUICK TRANSFER FROM BROKERAGE XXXX2435
</STMTTRN>Given how slow financial institutions are to work on such problems (you should certainly report it to them though) here is a workaround you can use my free program to convert the CSV file to a QFX file: https://www.quicknperlwiz.com/

To create a QFX file first do the column mapping and then enable the QFX export instead o QIF.

Chris_QPW

P.S. Note that if they ever get their QFX file fixes and you switch back you will get duplication transactions that one time because the way to generate the unique Id that Quicken uses to find duplicate transactions will change, but shouldn't be too much of a problem. Note for a QFX I would just normally open it in Notepad, it is a text file.

beck.snelgrove

I thought I had, I mostly just wanted to lay it out and have it confirmed by someone more familiar with Quicken as I'm a newer user. It also occurred to me after the fact there's probably a workaround to convert to QFX from CSV since I do have the needed info there, and you went and did both!

Really appreciate the feedback and I'll check out your tool as well!

beck.snelgrove

I also thought it was worth laying out the AmEx Credit Card connection vs High Yield Savings account lack of integration since I'd been struggling to find that written plainly anywhere.