Information Available for Automatic Transfer Detection

Chris_QPW

This is just some information on what is and what isn’t available to Quicken Windows for trying to do automatic transfer detection.

In general, Quicken really has two things for the two sides of a transfer, the date and the amounts. Quicken will assume that two downloaded transactions are a transfer if the dates are within 5 days and if the amounts are the same, but with opposite signs.

One might wonder if there is any more information that might be sent with the downloaded transaction that would help Quicken make this decision. As best I can, I will give you what I know about this.

First off in both Direct Connect and Express Web Connect + it has been noted that the financial institution can mark a transaction as a transfer. But in both cases that I have seen this reported (USAA and Venmo) it has been done at the wrong time and caused nothing but problems.

In the case of USAA it was marking all deposits as transfers, and in the case of Venmo in the strictest sense it was doing the right thing, but because how the user was using it they wanted it to be a deposit not a transfer. Marking something as a transfer assumes the other side of that transfer is in Quicken, and it might not be. As in one might “transfer money to a friend”.

This marking of a transaction as a transfer makes Quicken put TXFR in the check number/reference number field and will restrict the category to a transfer.

The other information that can be put in based on the OFX standard (Direct Connect) is the name of the accounts involved in such a transfer. First off, these names will not be the ones you use for the account in Quicken, so Quicken would have to save this name while the accounts are being created and coordinate them with the actual account in Quicken. But this only works when the transfers are between accounts in the same financial since a given financial will not know the name of the account the transfer is going to at another financial institution.

And then there is the fact that for Express Web Connect (and most likely Express Web Connect +) this information isn’t being provided at all.

So given the inconsistency of such data, it isn’t any wonder that Quicken Windows isn’t making use of it.