I want to understand how Quicken connects to Charles Schwab. Why do my balance never seem to match?

RC1969

My downloaded information from schwab into quicken is often incorrect. I do not understand why this is the case. Each morning I can do a manuel download from Schwab into quicken and the accounts total never match perfectly the values that I can see at Schwab directly. Why is this? The errors can be small or even on occasion very, very large.

I'd love to see this corrected, but at minimum I'd like to understand how they connect. Is there some 3rd party in between Quicken and Schwab that causes the discrepancies? Or, are the download coming directly from Schwab, and if they are then why do they not match?

Tom Young

Your downloads are no longer coming directly from Schwab.

With Schwab's move away from Direct Connect and adoption of the EWC+ method of downloading into Quicken your computer is no longer directly talking to Schwab's servers. Instead there's an "aggregator" involved now (Intuit) that polls Schwab from time to time, and holds that information on its servers. So when you request a download from Schwab you're now asking Quicken (the company) to ask Intuit to send them the information, which then is sent along to your computer.

When Schwab was using Direct Connect I had occasional instances of imbalances and almost always the difference amounted to the last transaction in that particular Account. I pretty much had to assume that this was due to some lag at Schwab between the recording of the transaction and the updating, somewhere in their system, of the "holdings" balance. With a subsequent update request the balances would come into alignment.

I'd sort of expect, if my assumption is correct, that this "lag" could be exacerbated by the move to EWC+ since a request for download doesn't kick off a request directly to Schwab. Instead it results in a request to Intuit to send along whatever they have in their servers, which almost certainly is "stale dated" to a certain extent.

If my assumption is correct and you're a very active trader with a morning of 1:00 AM Eastern Standard Time, that might explain what you're seeing, but probably not. You might see if evening updates work better, but ultimately I think you may have to talk to Official Quicken Support to see why your problem is occurring.