Supporting connections

bob@

I just bought quicken classic personal and business for Mac, but am already looking at returning because I can't connect to business related accounts. I have two rental properties with loans through Lakeview sub-serviced by Mr Cooper and LoanCare, neither of which I can connect to. I also use Stessa to manage the rental properties, and they offer a checking account which is tied to the properties. There is no option for connecting to them.

1. How long does it take to fix those connections to the mortgage lenders?
2. How long will it take for you to support Stessa?

Quicken Anja

Hello @bob@,

In order for a financial institution or certain account types to support downloads to Quicken and to be added to our bank list, the request to be added would need to be made and submitted by the financial institution to our service providers. If you want Quicken to be supported, you will need to contact your financial institution directly and tell them you'd like to download your accounts into Quicken.

I hope this information serves to be useful to you! Thank you.

bob@

Hi @Quicken Anja,

Thanks for the response. The first two are supported by quicken already, just broken. Stessa is the one that isn't supported by quicken, but it is supported by other similar apps, such as mint and personal capital (empower). Wouldn't that mean that they already support integration and it's quicken that needs to add their side of that integration?

I've read the comment about "the request to be added would need to be made and submitted by the financial institution" in other threads. IMHO, this is a cop out for quicken to not take the responsibility to expand their product and make it more useful for their customers. Why wouldn't it be in the best interest of quicken to engage with the companies their customers are using to foster that support? Instead it comes across as "it's on you customer, even though you're paying for this software". As a business user that is evaluating this software, not supporting all my integrations at this time I can understand, telling me I need to chase it down with no help from quicken makes it a non-starter. Is this the official stance of quicken?

jacobs

@bob@ Quicken is actually a pretty small company (about 200 employees), and they don't deal with connectivity issues with the ~14,000 financial institutions they can connect to. Instead, the have a connectivity provider — Intuit — which handles the connectivity both legally and technically with each financial institution. The financial institution must sign on with Intuit and agree to allow connection for Quicken downloads. If the financial institution has done so, then there may be a configuration issue at Intuit which needs to be reported to be fixed; if the financial institution has not signed on to allow Quicken downloads, then there is nothing Quicken can do. That's why the Quicken moderators here tell users to prod their financial institutions to initiate the connectivity with Intuit.

Some financial institutions just don't want to bother (security concerns, time for customer support) and decline to support Quicken. With others, it just gets lost in the shuffle of their legal and IT issues, as supporting Quicken is likely low on their priority list. Yes, it would be great if Quicken had teams of people who were constantly in contact with financial institutions, but that's just not the case.

jaralyea

This is nonsense. I spoke to Lakeview and they support Quicken. I can create a Lakeview account but the problem is Quicken reports my loan is paid off. Intuit or Quicken should contact Lakeview or Loancare. I got no where talking with them.

bob@

@jacobs , thanks for the reply. I understand how it works, I was with intuit when quicken (and some of the other products) were divested. I appreciate that they're a small company, but so are many others that do this same thing. If they're going to say it's business class software then there are certain expectations that come with that. The other company I mentioned is also a small company (even smaller) and they chase down their integrator (Yodlee) because they understand that if their customer's business software doesn't work then they can't manage their business.

Regardless, all three work in mint, which is owned and operated by intuit. If the problem is with intuit why do they work with mint and not quicken? That's a hypothetical question, I'm just trying to get an answer from quicken on my original 2 questions so I can make a decision on whether I keep the software or not.

NotACPA

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20407502#Comment_20407502

This is a QMac thread. You're running QWin. Start your own thread.

Chris_QPW

@bob@ Here is my opinion. Intuit sucks as an aggregator, and Quicken Inc is pretty much stuck with that terrible aggregator because of all the changes that they would have to make to switch another.

Plus, history isn't on their side.

The main QA person for Quicken once told me that the Quicken group always had a hard time getting the "connection group" to do anything for them. She expressed the belief/hope that once Quicken Inc was a customer instead of just another group in Intuit that they would respond better. I have not seen anything to indicate that they have got better.

And the "history" part that affects Quicken is the fact that we are talking about multiple different aggregation methods with different contracts, and such with a company like Intuit that seems to have the attitude that it is not their responsibility to service either or their customers (Quicken Inc, or the financial institutions, and in the past Quicken users), that "all must come begging them for their service, instead of trying to be proactive about it.

Unfortunately, the financial institutions didn't fully adopt Direct Connect, and "aggregation" became the norm. Now you have all these different aggregators with different schemes on how to get the data.

From what I can tell (and you might know better if you worked in Intuit) "Quicken Connect" was basically a spinoff of Mint's aggregation. That is probably one reason it seems to have less problems than Express Web Connect (which is compared to, but certainly isn't the same thing). Intuit bought Mint just around the time that they did the big rewrite of Quicken Mac so this make perfect sense. But of course, they have parted ways years ago and aren't exactly the same.

But the bottom line here is this, it is clear that you have all these different aggregation methods, and it doesn't matter in the least that Intuit is providing them. They are all "separate" and it is clear that Intuit has no intension of ever bring the best each into one solution.

Chris_QPW

P.S.

The other company I mentioned is also a small company (even smaller) and they chase down their integrator (Yodlee) because they understand that if their customer's business software doesn't work then they can't manage their business.

When you are stuck with an aggregator that will not respond to you in a timely manner, you only have two choices. One is keep complaining to the "wall". And the other is to get a better aggregator. But the second choice is extremely hard and costly to do. So, the rock and the hard place.

BTW Intuit isn't the worst aggregator that I have seen. I don't know what Chase uses for pulling information from other financial institutions, but 50% of the ones I setup for that are constantly in the error state. I don't really depend on these so I don't care, but it just shows you that this an industry wide problem caused by the fact that the financial institutions will not adopt a proper protocol across all financial institutions.

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.

bob@

@UKR It's not that easy, the loan has been around for a while, it's changed services and I've refinance. I do not see a way to set up this loan manually

bob@

How does someone open a ticket with Quicken to get some action on the LakeView Loan (mylakeviewloan.com sub serviced by Mr Cooper) issue?

jacobs

You can call Quicken Support.

(You can also use Help > Report a Problem, but there’s no interaction so you know if they see the problem or not — so I wouldn’t recommend that in this case.)

bob@

Thanks @jacobs, the wait time is half an hour :(

jacobs

@bob@ All I can suggest is that you call at the different time when the wait time is shorter, or call at a time you can be working on something else until they come on the line.

bob@

I chatted with support, which led to a call, and in the end was told that LakeView Loan, sub serviced by Mr Cooper, is no longer supported.