Problem with matching credit card payment downloads (Q Mac)

John J Wagner

I am using Quicken for Mac 7.8.1. I use Huntington Bank, configured for Bank Bill Pay. Everything worked fine up until 3-4 months ago. I would enter a transaction to "Send" a payment from the bank to pay a credit card. The next day, while downloading bank transactions, I would get a transaction from the bank that the payment was "Sent". Quicken used to match the Send and Sent transactions, and all was fine. Now, however, Quicken creates a new transaction in the credit card account (but still only one transaction in my checking account). I have to manually delete one of the transactions in the credit card account.

This occurs with all credit card payments (Amer Express, Chase, Discover, etc.). Attached is a screen shot of my credit card register showing the payment transaction I initiated on 7/16 and the downloaded transaction from the bank on 7/17. These 2 transactions should have been matched together. How do I fix this?

jacobs

The 7/17 transaction is showing that it is already automatically matched to a transaction. It can't match to the 7/16 transaction because it is already matched with another transaction. What do you see if you Control-click the 7/17 transaction and select Unmatch transaction in the dropdown menu?

John J Wagner

Here's what the register looks like after I unmatched the 7/17 downloaded transaction. It created yet another payment transaction in the credit card register. No effect on the checking account register. Any ideas??

jacobs

What that screen shot's icons on the left show is that there were two manual transactions and one downloaded transaction; the downloaded transaction auto-matched to one, leaving the other duplicate as you showed originally.

So that raises the obvious question: why are there two different manual transactions to start with, one day apart? You manually enter a transaction for the bill payment, right? Is that entry made in the checking account register or the credit card register? Even if the bank improperly downloaded the transaction twice, it would show as a downloaded transaction. So I'm confused why there are two manual transactions. And even though we are seeing the two manual transactions each having a transfer to the checking account, are you saying there is only one transfer transaction in the checking account? (And if so, is that transaction a matched transaction, or a plain downloaded transaction?) Someone who regularly uses Bank Bill Pay may be able to offer more insight here.

If you delete one or the other of the manual transactions here, does it mess up the transaction(s) in the checking account? It should, since both show a transfer from checking. It might help if you make the Transfer column visible temporarily in the Visa account; is either of those transfer transactions showing an invalid transfer? Here's what a transfer look like normally…

…and here's what a transfer looks like when Quicken isn't connecting the transaction to another account (note the red line through the transfer arrow icon):

In the short-term, if one of the transactions has the invalid transfer icon, you can just delete that one and then manually re-match the other manual transaction and the downloaded transaction (drag one on top of the other), and all should be well in both accounts. Again, someone more experienced with Bank Bill Pay might be able to explain why the extra transaction is being created; I don't know if the bank is sending something incorrectly, or Quicken isn't recognizing the 'send' and 'sent' as the same transaction and eliminating one. If you don't get a clear answer here, you may need to contact Quicken Support to have them review this, see that something is wrong, and escalate it to their developers to look into.

John J Wagner

NORMALLY, when I pay a credit card using Bank Bill Pay, Quicken sends that transaction to the bank (in this case, Huntington). If I go to my bank web site I can see the transaction listed as "pending". The next day, when I sync Quicken with the bank, I get a downloaded transaction indicating that the payment has been sent (to the credit card company). Quicken matches the two transactions, and changes the status in my checking account register from "send" to "sent".

Since approx April, that match has not been working, and Quicken creates a new downloaded transaction instead, resulting in duplicate transactions in my credit card register. The checking account register is fine - no duplicates there. To fix it, I have been deleting one of the duplicate CC transactions, but I can only delete the downloaded (second) transaction. The first (manual) transaction is linked to the checking account and can't be deleted.

The problem may be related to certain credit cards. Discover, American Express and Chase have all displayed this problem. CITI card may still be working correctly. I'm paying the CITI card today, so tomorrow I'll post how that went.

Thanks for your help. I hope it can be resolved as I'm getting tired of manually deleting the duplicate transactions!

jacobs

Since I haven't seen widespread reports of this issue, I'm guessing that it's a problem introduced by your bank changing something in the way they encode the transactions for download. If it were a problem with Quicken Mac, I'd expect to see a lot of people complaining about this.

If you want to delve into this further, you could see if your credit card company provides a way to download transactions in QFX (or OFX or Quicken) format; if so, you could download a file, open it in TextEdit, and search for the payment transaction. If it downloads the second transaction (the "sent" one) asa. regular payment transaction, then that would pin the problem on the financial institution, and you could contact their tech support to get them to document it for a fix.

If you don't want to delve into it at that level, you could call Quicken Support. You'll have to go through all the steps with them, and hope that you have a representative who gets it. They can document it and create a support ticket which — if it's not a Quicken problem — will go to Intuit for them to resolve or work with the financial institution to resolve. Don't expect immediate results; these things usually take time to get fixed. 😉

John J Wagner

jacobs - thanks for your comments. I am going to pursue this issue with Quicken support. I'll post my results.

tntgalx10

This is definitely a quicken for mac issue (versus any particular credit card bank's issue). This has been a PIA for me since switching from Quicken Windows to Quicken Mac over a year ago. Never found any answer, and it's frustrating to have to manually do so much deleting and matching, every month - for any scheduled credit card Bills (i.e., transfers from my bank to a credit card account). 1) Quicken never "learns" when I drag the transaction that was "automatically entered 3 days before" and "automatically marked as paid," to the downloaded transaction from the credit card (i.e., the incoming credit/payment). I'm a 30 year veteran of Quicken, and so far… the Mac experience of Quicken has been the worst ever.

jacobs

Quicken never "learns"

One quick note: While in early years of modern Quicken Mac a decade ago, there may have been some "learning" aspect to the code, we've recently had it confirmed by Quicken folks that there is no "learning" in the current Quicken Mac code. (If things changed, it was when Renaming Rules and QuickFill Rules were added to Quicken Mac many years ago.)

(Sorry, I can't help with the matching/duplicates/deleting issue, as I enter most of my transactions manually and don't deal with the issue of transacitons downloaded to two accounts on opposite ends of a transfer.)

John J Wagner

So, after the 3rd call to Quicken Support, it looks like my matching issue has been resolved. Apparently my Quicken file had been corrupted - I don't know how - because the solution was 1) export my Quicken data into a Quicken Transfer File (QXF); 2) create a new Quicken file; 3) import the QXF file into the new Quicken file.

I had to re-establish the downloading connections for my checking account and all credit card accounts. Credit card payments are now processing correctly with no duplicate transactions (like they used to!).

Thanks go out to Jonathan at Quicken Support for walking me through the solution. Also thanks to jacobs and tntgalx10 for providing their insight.