Can't view loan/mortgage history/register

bgambrill

Since Wells Fargo went to Express Web Connect for mortgage and home equity loans the transcation history / register is no longer availible to view.

In another closed discussion on this topic, someone else said this is by design because the bank history info will always be accurate and does not to be availble to us.

This not the case as the principle balance of my mortgage in Quicken is several thouasnds of dollars diffrerent than what WF is showing.

I need to be able to view the mortgage account transaction hisory / register to determine why,

Please return this capability to us as we pay to have access to it.

WIndows R52.33 bulid 27.1.52.33

UKR

Just my 2cents' worth …
I would not bother attempting to activate any loan or mortgage accounts for downloading. I would just simply set them up as "offline" (manual) loan accounts with a Scheduled Reminder to record the monthly payment from your checking account.
(Not discussing LOC or HELOC accounts here. They should be set up as offline credit card accounts)

At least in Quicken for Windows, an online-connected loan or mortgage account does NOT have a transaction register. All data shown in the account come from whatever information the bank downloads to you ... if this process works at all.

As a result of being connected, the scheduled payment transaction reminder cannot transfer the amount of principal paid into the (non existent) account register and must use a category, usually something like Loan:Principal, instead. The category name seems to vary with the Loan Type you selected when creating the loan account in Quicken.

Effective with Quicken Windows 2018 and newer
you should be able to deactivate an online-connected loan account and regain full control over your transaction register. And you should also review the Scheduled Reminder (or Memorized Payee List entry) associated with the monthly loan payments to ensure they now transfer Principal to the loan account register and not to a Category.

If you're a Q Mac user, you should be able to do something similar about setting up and maintaining an offline mortgage account together with a correctly calculated Scheduled Transaction Reminder for the monthly payments from your checking account.

SniffNYC

I get around the issue of not having a register for mortgage accounts by using a customized version of the Spending by Payee report. Of course you need to use the same payee name for every mortgage payment (or add any additional versions of the bank name that you may have used to the list of selected payees). Once I created this report, I saw a number of line items called "Balance Adjustment". Over the course of the loan, they netted out to zero but it was both confusing and alarming. These are transactions inserted by Quicken to balance to the downloaded activity—maybe due to timing differences between the download and actual posted activity(?).

I was astonished at what the original comment said was stated in another post: "…the bank history info will always be accurate and does not to be available to us." That is ridiculous! Banks make mistakes all of the time and is the reason that reconciliations are important. I transferred money from one bank to my mortgage bank to reduce my mortgage balance (and subsequent interest expense) and the bank applied the money as future mortgage payments, not as a balance reduction. I would not have discovered that by simply relying on automatic updates to Quicken. Quicken would have just slapped in a Balance Adjustment (that is not visible unless looking at the Spending Report) and it would have appeared like everything was okay.

Of course, following the advice of UKR, the other person commenting on this post, is pretty good advice also—just don't do the automatic updates from the bank and keep an offline mortgage account. But by all means, reconcile your accounts, especially if you do prepayments on mortgages.

Boatnmaniac

…the bank history info will always be accurate and does not to be available to us.

Perhaps whoever posted this originally really said (or meant) that connected loan accounts will always accurately reflect what the lender's system shows? At least that would be a reasonably accurate thing to say. And it also does not imply that the lender's system is accurate because they can and do make mistakes, as well.

I think you'll find that most, if not all, Super Users in this forum hold the same position as stated by @UKR . That is, we will usually recommend setting up loans in Quicken as manual loan accounts because of a variety of reasons such as having an editable loan account register, being able to set up loan payments as transfers to the loan account, being able to reconcile the loan account, being able to review the amortization schedule and track interest vs principal payments, etc.