Navy Federal Synch error (QWIN)
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tldr; if using Chrome, try going to chrome://settings/content/all?searchSubpage=navyfederal&search=cookies and choose "Delete displayed data." Then use Add New Account (not Account / Online Services), and complete the process. Let us know what happens. If it doesn't work, then you can try deleting all browsing data (chrome://settings/clearBrowserData?search=cookies and select first 4 categories), but that may cost you quite a bit of time logging back into other websites and reconfiguring them.
@harryo thanks a million for posting your success. I successfully tried reducing the impact of what you'd done, and hopefully other users can reduce it further, as I've outlined above.
As a software vendor with a personal background of ten years doing tech support, I have a particular contempt toward vendors who put out guidance to the effect of: clear everything on your entire computer, die, be reincarnated, start your life all over, and see if things are better maybe, the next time around. It's lazy, impractical, and usually ineffective, putting the onus on users to deal with the technical debt of error-handling defects in the software. That actively causes the software to get worse over time, since problems are not diagnosed and resolved.
I think I've determined that clearing browsing history is a necessary step, probably indicating a "stale cookie" in browser cache. Since I didn't want to nuke everything in my Chrome browser status at the cost of hours of time redoing things across the Web, I switched my default browser to MS Edge, which I rarely use. It still failed, with the same pattern: HTTP 500 error message in browser; email from NFCU saying it worked; and 10-minute timeout of the Quicken dialog with, "…sign in failed due to time out or a connection error." Lather, rinse, repeat. Going to Account / Online Services resulted in immediate "Connection error" dialog.
I cleared all browser history in Edge. Using Add New Account somewhat worked, authorizing and then synching most of the new transactions.
That seems to be as good as it gets. I still had to hand-balance the accounts, determine missing amounts, go on the NFCU website, checklist all the transactions, and hand-enter two that were missing. And the account balance is not synching at all; it shows $0.
Perhaps things will get better on future updates, or maybe it will continue in the partly-defective pattern that Quicken account synchs have had for the last few years, with clearly broken transaction checkpointing. I'm sure there is a marvelous finger-pointing contest to be had between the financial institutions and Quicken about who is to blame for this poor state of affairs. But Quicken themselves are 100% at fault for making it well-nigh impossible for users to troubleshoot what's wrong. It would not be that hard to provide a power-user dashboard or log miner, clearly identifying what is going wrong. Or a "report this failure" log submission default. With that information, we could assist Quicken and the banks in identifying glitches and get them addressed more quickly than the period of years that it's taking for each problem to be resolved, even as two new problems appear in their place.
Just checked: my oldest Quicken transaction was 26 October 1990 — right about when I first wrote, released, and did tech support for a financial-related MS-DOS app, for mortgage banking sales. Quicken has added features but has gotten steadily worse in quality. Conversely, no better competitor has arisen. For the "balance your checkbook" use case that was one of the original rationales for the personal computer, it amazes me that there isn't a better market opportunity in this space, that an effective software team could exploit.
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[Removed - 3rd Party Software] are similar, but different. As close as to what I am use to at least with Quicken. I tried both and keep going back to quicken in hopes of a fix as it’s what I’m use to for 20+ years. Tough to teach an old dog new tricks
Simplifi from quicken downloads just fine, but it doesn’t have nor will ever get a runn8ng balance and I am hooked on that, full on refusal to learn to live without it.
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I'm fixed. Finally! I think I figured out my issue if it helps anyone else.
I had to go into my NFCU aacount under "more" and then "security." There it lists third party serfices which I approved, but it asked me to confirm them.
Second, when I was authorizing accounts, I was just selecting "Accept All," this apprently was a mistake. I connected just one checking account and it worked. I went through the process, saved and then authorized another checking account by itself. Again, it worked. I did this for each checking and savings account (one by one), all worked. I then did my car loan, it worked, but didn't bring anything over. I then did my mortage. It too worked, but didn't bring anything over (blank window).
Here's where it went sideways, I attempted to connectg my NFCU mastercard and then it failed with the same message "SIgn into NFCU failed, Try Again" "Sorry, the sign in failed due to time out or a connection error."
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@ron.p thanks for reporting back. The more of these success stories we get, the easier it will be for the rest of the community to try each and see what works. It is up to us to use trial-and-error to find and communicate solutions. Once we get this nailed down, we should probably post to r/quicken, which makes it more visible on web searches.
For completeness, I did not choose "Accept All," as I have access to accounts that make no sense to include in Quicken. I did add one new, incremental account, as well as four existing accounts (checking, savings, mortgage, LOC, Visa). Every time that I had used Add New Account, prior to clearing browser history, I got the email from NFCU declaring success, as well as the immediate HTTP 500 failure response in JSON in my browser, which I infer was just echoing back how Quicken's server was responding. That I pin on NFCU: no user should ever see a raw HTTP error—they are trivially easy to catch, while the back-end context needed to better explain them still exists, such as calling parameters. That would enable quick troubleshooting and resolution.
My hypothesis is that the stale cookie was affecting the parameters in backend the call from NFCU to Quicken. The most feasible way to address that kind of "handshake" problem is to get the two parties' teams together, live, with a live user who can reproduce it as they both watch their server logs and while the user can use debug tools to see their side of the three-way conversation. That would solve the problem within a business day. That's manifestly not how either NFCU or Quicken are approaching this, with NFCU directing users to Quicken, and Quicken failing apparently even to reproduce it for many months.
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…and two weeks later, the main checking account is not synching transactions more recent than six days ago, and the balance has never synched. So still grossly unreliable, but at least not throwing errors.
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I have same issue with NFCU accounts. I tried edge and chrome browsers and they don't work. I get the "500" error and an email saying accounts have been successfully linked. However they are not linked. TAll NFCU accounts have not updated since July 2.
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Have you tried authorizing just one checking account in quicken and checking only that one account when NFCU presents the list to authrize accounts? I have had zero issues since as long as I don't try to authorize my mastercard account with them. That's the account that seems to cause all the errors with failed authorization; at least for me. I then added one checking account and one savings account at a time.
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@ron.p thanks for that observation. I'll try it next time things get entirely unusable.
@Ron you might try deleting browser history (or at least all cookies at www.navyfederal.org). The browser-switching trick would only work if you had never used that browser with NFCU.
Maybe. All of this is frustratingly opaque, due to the lack of competent error handling in the entire conversation between Quicken and NFCU.
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