Why is Quicken so bad at downloading transactions online?

Question

Sporadic issues with errors downloading transactions. Previous issues with Bank of America. Now noticed issues with my Fidelity investments. Quicken missed downloads for nearly four months this year. Unbelievable one actually has to pay for this level of incompetence.

Chris_QPW · Answer

Was the problem at Fidelity a Net Benefits account?

Because it was definitely Fidelity that had the problem:

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7937703/fidelity-netbenefits-not-downloading-transactions-qwin

hdfxdwg07 · Answer

I would disagree. Downloading a .csv file at Fidelity is rather easy. Did all Fidelity account holders have this issue? Did Quicken issue any notice it was having issues with Fidelity? Thankfully I do not have to worry about my account balances but one would like the balances to be correct. Having to rely on an accurate account balance is crucial for many. I do not scrutinize every transaction each month but perhaps I should. One pays for a service and expects it to perform as advertised. If you paid for some service and did not receive 33% of what was paid for (in advance) would you mind? Quicken missed a third of my transactions from Fidelity for 2023. I pay for this level of service to download transactions. Will I get portion of my subscription refunded? HaHa. My confidence with any balance in Quicken is lost. Guess I will go back to downloading .csv files from all. At least they are accurate. And free.

jacobs · Answer

In almost all cases, download problems for financial institutions which have worked previously are due to changes made by the financial institution. Quicken contracts with Intuit to handle connectivity, but with 14,000+ financial institutions, it's easy to see that there's a never-ending battle for Intuit to keep up with changes made by the financial institutions. If every financial institution made only one change to its login/security procedures, server address, or data format per year, that would still amount to 40 broken financial institutions every day, 365 days a year. In an ideal world, each financial institution would reach out to Intuit in advance of a change, notify them of an upcoming change, and give them a test site to verify after updating their connection scripts — but in the real world, that often doesn't happen. In some cases, it's just a matter of time to get through the queue of issues at Intuit for them to make a change. In other cases, Intuit need to reach out to the financial institution and get their cooperation to restore connectivity — and working with Intuit for Quicken downloads is often low in on a bank's priority list when implementing website updates and security changes.

So, yes, it's a mess out there because Quicken, and mostly Intuit, are always playing catch-up to things broken by the financial institutions. Unfortunately, the financial service industry doesn't have an all-encompassing standard everyone adheres to to make this all work seamlessly. And while I absolutely understand the frustration, calling it incompetence at Quicken is probably a misdirection of your frustration.