I have to say I'm getting weary of all the download problems

Cindi Anderson

I've been using Quicken for 20+ years, and I appreciate the fixes they are making and that you can get support. But I'm pretty much come to the conclusion that it's impossible to keep your accounts accurate with their download service. Recently it was losing accounts at Ally. But there is a history over the years of transactions just not downloading, or downloading randomly into the wrong accounts. When you do a reset to try to fix things, they set your opening balance to something random so your balances are completely wrong and you lose all traceability to try to find such wrong transactions. I have a lot of accounts and I feel like I spent so much time hunting down problems trying to get my account balances to match that I might as well enter all my transactions myself. Which is sad.

oukid

I am also weary. I've used Quicken for many years, too. It seems like with every download I'm have to cull out duplicate transactions.

Unknown

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nmmi

I completely agree. I miss the days when we ran the same Quicken program for a few years and then bought the upgrade. Those worked well. Now it is subscription based and they "update" it every month or two just to make you think they are actually justifying there jobs. The result is nothing works anymore.

VegasPatrick

After 30+ years as a Quicken customer, like the other posters above, I am "weary" of all the download errors.

My checking account has been "buggy" for months— when I download to Quicken, it misses some transactions, duplicates others, nearly impossible to keep balanced for more than a day or so. Customer Support suggested that I restore it to an earlier date. I have also uninstalled/reinstalled the program. Neither effort solved the ongoing errors.

This month, one of my investments had a 3 for 1 split. My brokerage website shows 533 shares added to my existing 266 shares, for a new total of 799, but Quicken somehow made the total 1,322 shares. And of course, I cannot edit or correct the transaction manually. Have reported it to Quicken twice, no response.

Looking at alternative personal finance software now.

NotACPA

NOT ONE of those replying in this thread mentioned Financial Institutions with specific problems, or error coded received.

ERGO,no one here can help you since you haven't provided enough info for anyone to try to diagnose. "Doc, it hurts" is all you've told us.

LA1

I also have used Quicken for more than 20 years. It's always been really great in the past. I'm now spending so much time trying to get my issues fixed. One person finally was able to help me after working with Quicken elevated support. I was so thankful after tries with other support people that just couldn't help. This took well over a day of my time. Now I discovered the fix generated duplicate transactions in another place. I thought everything was clean, but its not. Now, I either manually fix things or just plug numbers to make it balance. This has already taken half of my day. I'm also looking for another financial software to use.

GECTDLB

Ditto! I've attempted to download transactions all day with no luck! What is a viable alternative???

NotACPA

@LA1 @GECTDLB

See my prior response.

LA1

LA1

I’m not sure that you could have helped me without looking at my Quicken instance.

This is just an example on one issue I’ve had lately. My credit card account was flagged as a checking account and this could not be changed to be a credit card account. So my transactions were all coming thru with the wrong signs.

After talking to support at least 3 times, I dropped it and just worked around the reversed signs so I was able to manually balance with the Credit Card bank account. This worked OK until some transactions were not coming thru.

I was told twice that it was a bank issue, back and forth with the bank (bank says Quicken issue, Quicken says bank issue).

Then lots of transactions were missing so I had to try again. I called Quicken and told the assigned tech to escalate my problem to a higher support level which he did.

This new person was finally able to find out that the file was corrupted. He copied my transactions and put them in a test file, which worked, and deleted the beginning balance as there was no beginning balance. I then had to manually add my payments but I was finally balanced, but only within this “test” record. BTW, payments did start showing up couple of months later but not consistently.

I just started getting a message that the test file should be deleted but I can’t because its accurate and the other one isn’t and never will be. I just noticed as I was writing this that all of my files on Quicken are flagged as test now, but they are all in balance. The original bad one has a red circle with a line in it.

RTVS

I am tired of all the download issues also. I have spent over 5 hours with Quicken phone support and tried everything they suggested and walked me through, STILL no resolution to download problems for certain accounts. It pains me, but am looking for and trying new financial software apps. Not resubscribing after 30+ years of using Quicken

whodiini

This is my observation and recommendation after 30+ years of using Quicken. Their current operating model is to add new features with minimal testing as a priority and fix issues as they show up. This places a high priority on adding new features and a lower priority on reliability. I have been a beta tester and found that Quicken doesnt actually have beta testers test the actual release, but some other version, so bugs invariably leak out. So users will find out that some releases are stable and others will corrupt your data file. For example, release R59.35 is stable. R60.12 had a bunch of improvements and corrupted my file such that I could no longer open it, and running validation did not fix it. R60.14 and R60.15 were attempts at fixing the crashes. I found that I had to revert to my saved file that ran under R59.35 and restored R59.35 for a stable system. I use this real life example to explain what to do:

1. Do a backup at the end of every day. You may need to restore an older backup if you update your version.
2. DO NOT automatically update quicken to the latest version. Look at the changes. If it has a lot of "improvements", hold off as there is a high probability this version is unstable. Wait a few weeks for the releases that come up with fixes to the crashes.
3. When you decide to update your quicken version, make a full backup of data. Make a restore link in windows so you can easily restore to that older stable quicken release. The update your quicken and test out for a few days. If it crashes or does strange unwanted stuff, restore your windows to the older release of quicken, restore your preupdate quicken file and wait for a few more releases that address the crashes. Sometimes this takes 1-2 months to truly fix the issues.

With this procedure, I have been running stably a few years despite the issues at Quicken. Because it is so laborious to do updates, I dont do updates very often, maybe once a quarter, which is fine by me. Most of the improvements are fluff anyway and dont address stability.