Completely unable to manually enter retirement info when offline

louabill

Bug:

Using Quicken Deluxe for Mac Version 7.1.2 (Build 701.49356.100) under macOS 13.4.1 c.
When manually entering a transaction into investments (e.g. Reinvest Dividend for an IRA) offline, the transaction does not stick.

Reproducible Actions:
Open up the transactions for the ABC IRA account
Add a new transaction for the XYZ fund
Change the date to the proper date
Change the type to Reinvest Dividend, for example
Put in the security name
Enter the dividend amount
Enter the number of shares
Press the return key or click on the Save button

Result:

A new entry is made with a blank security, the correct investment amount, but zero shares being bought and a zero balance (so it appears money comes into the account and vanishes, which is a separate problem).

Discussion:

This has been an ongoing bug since at least 2021. In the past, the transaction would stick after between 1 and 3 attempts if I altered the Memo field. Now it seems to stick ONLY if I'm online. I prefer working offline, and Quicken supposedly works offline.

I regret having paid my rental fee for the upcoming year. I thought perhaps that this bug had finally been fixed, but it appears it has been fixed to require using Quicken online and letting it look over my shoulder.

I hope that I'm wrong, so if anyone knows how to enter investement entries into Quicken while offline without a hassle please let me know.

louabill

Just got off a very long chat with support, and they had me

First start a new file and see if I could enter financial transactions (I could).

Then start a new account within my existing file and see if I could add transactions. I could if I made up a new nonsense symbol. If I used a symbol that existed in another account, though, I could not enter new transactions.

Then try to delete a symbol and add it again to see if it would work. I was leery of doing this, so I tried renaming a valid symbol to a nonsense symbol… and I could not add transactions.

The final result is that they think that my file is corrupted. Bad news, as it contains over 30 years of data. They would like me to send them the entire file so that they can figure out 'settings' (not sure how this is meant) and maybe repair the file. The chat person claimed that they would only look at these mystery settings and not look at any of the actual data in the file, and that I would have to contact them on Monday, as it was a higher-level team that needed to look at them.

I'll put more here once I know more, in order to possibly save some other soul from this glitch and its resulting waste of hours upon hours.

louabill

OK. I misspoke. When I make a new account and put in an investment transaction, it will work once in a row. After that, the new transaction may or may not catch when offline, mostly not catching. I've experimented with all sorts of goofiness, because for the last two years I thought that the problem was due to some trigger not going off, and Quicken incorrectly thinking that the transaction was incomplete. So… I tried being sure that every field was entered from scratch, tried not having Quicken lose focus inbetween adding information, tried alternating different types of transactions, all to no avail.

I do not believe that file corruption is the problem, as a brand new file exhibited this behavior on the second transaction. So… now I think that Quicken is running an online check and not filling in the transaction when it fails (but then I cannot explain why I might be able to add every 10th transaction).

Arrgh. I worked at a software company for years and would purposely stress test software to catch bugs. I didn't plan on doing it for free after retiring.

jacobs

@louabill I don't have answers for you about what's going on with your data, but I can give you some anecdotal information that I have no problem entering manual investment transactions. I do this in my personal data file, and I also do it in my parents' data file. The investment accounts are not connected for downloading, so all transaction entry is manual. Security prices download automatically. I enter Reinvest Dividend, Dividend, Interest, Long- and Short-Term Capital Gains, Buy and Sell transactions for multiple securities in multiple accounts, both retirement and brokerage, and after hundreds of transactions over many years, I have never had a transaction fail to save as entered.

You've highlighted online versus offline entry. Do you mean you disconnect your computer from the Internet while entering transactions? If so, I'm curious why you do that. Although I'm entering transactions manually, my computer typically has a WiFi connection. But I was able to replicate your problem if I turned my WiFi off! I was surprised to see that entering a Reinvest Dividend transaction saved the date and Amount, but not the Security or the Number of Shares and Share Price. In limited testing, I find this easily repeatable, (as long as I used a security I hadn't already entered for the same day).

I don't know what Quicken is doing that would require online connectivity for during manual investment transaction entry, nor why lack of being online would affect entries from being saved correctly. But I'd again come back to the question of why/whether you need to be offline when you enter investment transactions; while I don't understand what it needs connectivity for, it seems clear that having your computer online prevents the problem from occurring.

If you pursue this with Quicken Support after the weekend, I think I'd focus on asking them to turn off their Internet connection and then to enter a transaction for an existing security on a new date, to see that the transaction doesn't save correctly. My very limited testing proves that there is not a problem unique to your data file, so hunting for problems with your data file is going down the wrong road.

louabill

@jacobs : Thanks for looking at this. I haven't had the opportunity to go through this again with support (last time it took nearly 2 hours), but I'm glad I'll be able to point to this discussion.

Also: about the automatic downloading of prices: all the securities I have have the 'download quotes' unchecked, which I would think would prevent the prices from being downloaded. I could well be misinterpreting 'quote', however.

As for whether I need to be offline: I supposed I don't technically need to be offline. I've just always tried to be offline, because I'm not a real fan of quicken gathering data on what securities I have or am trading, as I didn't think that accounting software included data sharing without explicit permission. I'm a bit, uh, particular about disliking this type of 'what's mine is mine, what's yours is negotiable' philosophy.

jacobs

I supposed I don't technically need to be offline. I've just always tried to be offline, because I'm not a real fan of quicken gathering data on what securities I have or am trading

I could be wrong, but I don't believe Quicken is spying on you gathering such information. If you don't use Quicken Cloud to sync your data for use with the mobile app or web interface, and if you don't download transaction data from your financial institution(s), then I don't believe the software is examining the manual transactions you enter to harvest information about your wealth or investing. I'm not sure why the program needs to be online to enter the manual transactions successfully, but I think the explanation is likely much less nefarious. (I'm guessing it has something to do with checking the price of the security in the reinvest dividend transaction.) If Quicken wanted to harvest our data, they could have the program transmit to their servers any number of times, such as when installing a new version of software and updating the data file to work with it. As someone who enters my transactions manually, I don't worry about them gathering my data, and I see no need to go offline when entering data in Quicken.

louabill

I guess I default to not trusting any company who insists on you being connected to the internet to use their software, as being connected to the internet is a tool for harvesting data (see: Google).

Farther in the past, I trusted Quicken to go by what they said when I asked about upgrading, namely that the software could be used offline if I didn't connect any accounts.

Then I noticed that even for securities where I told Quicken not to download price histories, Quicken was downloading price histories, so it was calling home. I cannot NOT believe that these calls home do not get saved in their data troves. [1]

So… I moved to working offline with Quicken. This worked most of the time, though security transactions would not catch some of the time.

Now, it appears that for securities, it is impossible to work offline. This bothers me. It likely bothers very few others, but since Quicken is supposed to be useable offline, it should work that way.

As you say, Quicken could upload all financial info every time it gets used. This would be a huge breach of trust, however, and I'm not sure any but the most shady company would do this.

Am I paranoid? I don't think so. I just don't like being the product, even though this is the current state of business.

Bill

[1] A database administrator friend of mine had Bose as a client. They have terabytes of info, because they monitor what goes through their wireless headphones. If Bose does this with something as trivial as headphones, imagine a company which gives investment advice watching accounts.