Yet another malfunction of Quicken and/or multiple financial institutions downloads

ray476

So in addition to Target, Kohls, Fidelity Investments, Bank of America, Citibank, Synchrony/Amazon Card, Apple Card, we can now add Elan/Fidelity Rewards card as an issue that doesn't get fixed. The dreaded "we have no ETA for a fix" is not an answer!

There have been so many promised fixes and open support tickets I give up! They even had the audacity to edit of my last posts as a "rant"!

Various issues but most center on failed updates with multiple institutions. Often the "fix" suggested is to manually download each account making the main reason for using Quicken a waste. I can always go to each individual website and manually update, but that convivence is what I thought I was paying Quicken for, not just to be a electronic version of my checkbook. Paying bills from within Quicken has been so frustrating I moved to Fidelity Bill pay that now won't download correctly! What now?

Bad job to have open issues like these for multiple months! Is this a rant? No, these are my actual experiences over the past 18 months. I have been a Quicken user since the DOS days, so its not just a newbie thing. The issues mount with every passing month- check the "closed" threads for issues that are never solved.

jacobs

I'm completely sympathetic, but I think it's worth noting that Quicken is in many cases at the mercy of the financial institutions and, to a lesser extent, its connectivity provider, Intuit. Very few of the problems are caused by a change in Quicken's code or systems. Some problems can be resolved by Quicken making changes, but generally that's not the case. As frustrated as users are reporting problems to Quicken, imagine Quicken being equally frustrated at reporting problems to Intuit and the financial institutions. Especially if they fix a reported problem and break something else in the process. And financial institutions are making many more, and more frequent, updates to their websites, servers, user authentication and security than they used to.

Does that bring any solace to you for connections which are broken? No, I know it doesn't. 😉 We all just want it to work, right? And when it doesn't we're understandably frustrated.

We all use Quicken differently and find value in different things. For me, having all my financial accounts gathered in one place, and all my transaction history searchable in one place, is where the value lies — to the extent that I'm willing to enter my transactions manually to avoid all the connectivity issues. But of course, I understand that many people wouldn't want to do that. If you ultimately determine that using Quicken is no longer viable enough for you, and if you can find something else which works better for your needs (a big 'if'), perhaps that that will be your path in the future.

ray476

You are 100% correct that many, if not most of the issues are caused by security changes, etc. on the website. It may actually be beyond Quicken's ability to fix many issues. Here is where I have a bone to pick with them- List the known problematic websites/services in an easy to search FAQ or the like instead of sending people in loops that them must know will not work. Of course if many websites are choosing not to allow dependable connections in the name of security (which I suspect), place the blame squarely on their shoulders.

I understand the reluctance to do so because it makes the software much less useful, and would be difficult to honestly advertise as an all in one place financial program. Part of me thinks its a question of who pays who and how much. Everybody wants a piece. In any event, the holy grail I hoped Quicken would evolve into is not in the cards- at least not soon. Finding a better alternative? I'm all for it, but frankly, nothing else is any closer. A bit more transparency would have saved me hours of frustration.

jacobs

A bit more transparency would have saved me hours of frustration.

What, like this: "Quicken connects to more than 14,000 financial institutions. Although… some of them are down/blocked/broken/non-operable any any time — that's 24 x 7 x 365. Which institutions are not operating varies from day to day, so if you've run into a download problem, just hang in there and hopefully it'll come back online sometime soon." 🤣🤣

Seriously, I'm not sure what they could say to be more transparent. The "Alerts, Online Banking & Known Product Issues" category of this forum seems to be about as comprehensive as they are able to be. Part of the problem is that users often discover problems before anyone at Quicken is aware, and there's a lag between problem reports from users, someone at Quicken documenting it, getting it to the proper team at Quicken to verify, and getting confirmation back so the moderators can post an Alert announcement. A better dashboard of financial institution known issues, which could be easily searched, would be an improvement. Heck, if the Search on this site offered the ability to limit the search to the current category, that would be really useful in searching just within the "Alerts, Online Banking & Known Product Issues" category. Unfortunately, the search on this site is pretty miserable, and Quicken can't change that because this site runs on a software platform from Vanilla, who is responsible for the search functionality.

Of course if many websites are choosing not to allow dependable connections in the name of security (which I suspect), place the blame squarely on their shoulders.

I'm pretty sure Quicken doesn't do this because they don't want to offend the financial institutions. Quicken depends on the financial institutions allowing them to log in to pull down user data, and financial institutions can simply cut them off. I've heard a few anecdotes from people at Quicken who have said a financial institution basically told them "do it our way, or we'll cut you off". So while it would make Quicken look better, and might be more satisfying to Quicken users, I don't think you'll ever see Quicken publicly throwing any financial institutions under the bus, or holding them accountable for Quicken being unable to download.

ray476

An update to the ongoing frustrations with Quicken. First, Let me say that the entire Elan Card services is acting strangely. Now I get a request for 2FA on one Elan card and it downloaded fine. My other card- no errors, but no downloads. Different than the posted "outage".

In my efforts to find working alternatives for ongoing issues with Kohls, Target, Citibank, Synchrony, and others, I stumbled into a competing, albeit not as eloquent spreadsheet based product that was easily able to download ALL of my accounts (except Apple Card) with no issue. It even got my Credit union transactions that both Quicken and my Credit Union said they did not support downloads! My research indicates that they use a different provider than Quicken, hence different results. You have to have a desire to deal with complex spreadsheets (all free after you pay a yearly fee) similar to what Quicken charges.

Functionality is the advantage here. Quicken has many more features, but the issues with Quicken is that many of them don't work or work intermittently at best. As an intermediate level spreadsheet user, I do find this product a bit intimidating, but it opened my eyes to what is possible. They have a free trial, and I am not yet sold on it, but its worth a look if you are as frustrated as me. I don't want to mention the product by name to avoid the obvious conflict of interest, but one thing is clear, there is move than one way to go. Until now I didn't think so.