Can't find my investment company when searching the financial institutions for Canada ?
I'd like to set up my Group Investment accounts from Manulife.ca (note: not the same as Manulife Bank). However when searching through the financial institutions that are offered by Quicken Home & Business (subscription) it doesn't list it as available. Being one of the larger providers in Canada, I would hope I'd be able to set them up as an account that downloads the updates.
Anybody have any insight, or suggestions? Yes, I know I can set them up manually so that I have to do my own updates, but this defeats the purpose of why I purchased Quicken.
Best Answer
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The Canadian version of Quicken supports downloading bank account (i.e. savings, chequing, LoC, credit card, etc) transaction data from a large number of financial institutions, but it supports downloading investment transactions from very few financial institutions - you can count them on one hand, and the list of supported financial institutions does not include many large players (that you might expect to be on the list). For example, I use RBC Direct Investing (as one of my discount/online brokers) and transaction download from RBC DI is NOT supported.
You can get a view of which Canadian financial institutions support download of by inspecting a file called FIDIR.TXT that you'll find on your computer. You can view an old (outdated/stale) version of this file online using this link:
The file is a bit cryptic to read, but if you search for the text string "INVESTMENT&" that will allow you to identify all the (few) financial institutions that support what you are seeking. You'll find a few FIs that support the Web Connect method to download investment transactions. None support Express Web Connect last time I checked (Maybe that has changed since I last checked?).
Although I've been using Quicken to track investments since that functionality was introduced to Quicken (decades ago), I have never once experienced the luxury of downloading investment transactions. I also understand that downloading investment transactions - at least in the Canadian version - may not provide a great experience (but again, my only experience with that is vicarious).
Unless you are prepared to move all your investments to TD Waterhous, TD Mutual Funds, or Scotia Connect or the very few others, I'm afraid manual key poking is practically your only option.
Sorry to be the bearer of unexpected bad news…. nonetheless, if you found this answer helpful (in an informative sense - it won't have solved your issue), please mark it accordingly.
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Answers
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The Canadian version of Quicken supports downloading bank account (i.e. savings, chequing, LoC, credit card, etc) transaction data from a large number of financial institutions, but it supports downloading investment transactions from very few financial institutions - you can count them on one hand, and the list of supported financial institutions does not include many large players (that you might expect to be on the list). For example, I use RBC Direct Investing (as one of my discount/online brokers) and transaction download from RBC DI is NOT supported.
You can get a view of which Canadian financial institutions support download of by inspecting a file called FIDIR.TXT that you'll find on your computer. You can view an old (outdated/stale) version of this file online using this link:
The file is a bit cryptic to read, but if you search for the text string "INVESTMENT&" that will allow you to identify all the (few) financial institutions that support what you are seeking. You'll find a few FIs that support the Web Connect method to download investment transactions. None support Express Web Connect last time I checked (Maybe that has changed since I last checked?).
Although I've been using Quicken to track investments since that functionality was introduced to Quicken (decades ago), I have never once experienced the luxury of downloading investment transactions. I also understand that downloading investment transactions - at least in the Canadian version - may not provide a great experience (but again, my only experience with that is vicarious).
Unless you are prepared to move all your investments to TD Waterhous, TD Mutual Funds, or Scotia Connect or the very few others, I'm afraid manual key poking is practically your only option.
Sorry to be the bearer of unexpected bad news…. nonetheless, if you found this answer helpful (in an informative sense - it won't have solved your issue), please mark it accordingly.
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Thanks Arctic Hare. I'll admit I was fairly certain the response would be a 'not possible' when I posted the question. But, it's still disappointing. I'm sure I'm not alone in wanting full update capability with all of my financial accounts. In 2023, we shouldn't have to tediously/manually enter our account information to be able to calculate our net worth, or give us a quick snapshot of our investments. Quicken needs to do better for their customers here in Canada (my guess is that their focus is on the larger US market). And of course our financial institutions need to be pressured to allow access to this information.
Thanks again for the quick reply. Much appreciated.
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You are not alone… but, keep in mind Quicken can't provide the service without the financial institution signing up to support the download. This is more about compelling the financial institute to sign up to support Quicken than it is about Quicken taking any action. I don't know of any reason why Quicken wouldn't sign up more FIs if the FIs were interested.
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"Downloading investment transactions from Canadian investment firms into Quicken" -
This has been a major issue for me ever since I started using Quicken in the early 1990's.
I have had banking and investment accounts at Scotia Bank and Scotia iTrade, and TD Bank and TD Direct Investing for at least the last 25 years.
The only option for the transactions at these investing account is to export to a CSV file. But these cannot be imported into Quicken.
For TD the other option is to go the Holdings page for the account in TD Direct Investing. There you can export a QFX file which will download all the holdings into a Quicken account, including symbol, name, current price and the total current value, but not the transactions. You can then manually enter the cost basis for each holding from the investing account's numbers.
Unfortunately for Scotia iTrade I could find no way to import any investment data into Quicken, including current holdings as with TDDI.
As far as I know, there is no way to track or import transactions into Quicken Canada (Windows) other than to manually enter each individual transaction. It's tedious, but it helps me keep close track of all my investments and accounts at different institutions in one place.
It's ironic that one can import bank transactions from these banks and current holdings in TD investment accounts, but not the investment transactions. Arctic Hare is correct in that it is up to the financial institution to allow the transactions to be downloaded and it's likely close to the bottom of the their to do lists.
If enough Quicken Canada users start contacting Canadian investment firms and asking about implementing this feature they may begin to think about it. But in these days of rising costs and shrinking revenues it's probably be something they are reluctant to put resources into.1 -
@JosefW Thanks for sharing that detailed insight. As noted, none of the financial institutions that I use for investments indicate support for investment transactions in the FIDIR.TEXT, so I've never attempted to download transactions. It would be interesting to cross reference the financial instutions that you have listed with what is in the current FIDIR.TXT. Based on your comments, I'm wondering whether the FIDIR.TXT gives the impression of greater functionality than what really exists.
I won't hold my breath waiting for additional support for investment transaction download in Canada. I suspect that one of the issues is that there are a bunch of differences in rules, protocols and nomenclature between the US and Canada on the investment side of things. Banking is pretty straight forward, but investments have nuances that would would have to be addressed by Quicken to make it work. With manual entry of investment transactions, Quicken leaves it to the Canadian user to navigate around the missalignments between the program configuration and how the Canadian system actually works. If they were to implement full transaction downloading they would have to address these disconnects.
I also agree that adding support for investment transaction downloads is not likely of much interest to the Canadian financial institutions. One of the benefits of Quicken is that allows one to view a portfolio across institutions. It isn't difficult to see that each institution would rather have 100% of each customer's business and, hence, they have focused on building porfolio tools that give visibility of what is held their institution.
On a related note, what I'd really like to see added to Quicken Canada is support for Direct Connect. I've never been able to get a reliable explanation why that isn't in place (with the Canadian product) and why implementing it seems to be a non-starter. Some have claimed that Direct Connect is prohibited by Canadian laws, but when I've questioned/challenged that argument no one has ever been able to provide any factual justification. In fact, no one has even been able to cite which Canadian laws prohibit it.
I just hope that we don't regress to not even having Express Web Connect support for Canadian banking as that seems to be fragile at times.
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JosefW / Arctic Hare … thanks for the info. Obviously not what I want to hear, but it certainly confirmed my suspiciouns. I'll send a request to Manulife and see what kind of a response I get. They won't make changes based on one request, but their response might be telling. Thanks again!
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Would be lovely to have but it's not happening.
I'd be happy if Quicken could automate entering dividends a bit more. Would be much easier than using reminders. And then allow you to update the dividend amount if the company announces an increase/decrease.
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