Schwab Investment Account updates is defective, it doesn't properly add transactions

jwlpgh

When using automatic updates for my Schwab Investment account, my short sales get added as cash deposits and the buy to cover transactions are being added as buy to open. This causes the share balance to be incorrect and cash balance to be incorrect.

As I have researched this community, this is a known problem for some time. One of the recommended fixes is to manually accept/edit the downloaded transactions, however this option is not available as my choice is to accept the error or delete the transaction. If I have to manually enter the transaction than what is the purpose of automatic downloads?

Quicken should disable the defective automatic downloads of Schwab until they can figure out the correct coding or offer a discount since the program doesn't work as advertised. They continue to raise prices of the software, but are not repairing the known defects.

MontanaKarl

The problem is 100% Schwab. Schwab handles maturing fixed income and a bunch of other stuff incorrectly in terms of what it provides to Quicken. Quicken cannot fix this, only Schwab can…. and based on years of customer complaints to Schwab, it is clear that they just aren't going to. It's really irritating that such a huge company cannot afford a little bit of someone's time to fix their coding and make their customers happy, but Schwab just doesn't seem interested.

Quicken works as advertised and has no defects in this regard. Schwab just doesn't give Quicken what it needs. I've accepted that I have to edit more than a few Schwab transactions… but the vast majority of transactions download fine, so it's still easier than manually entering them.

jwlpgh

The problem is NOT 100% Schwab. The problem is 100% Quicken. I have been a long term user of quicken and expect 100% accurate information from them. If quicken is aware of a problem with a vendor they should pause the automatic download feature for that vendor until all parties can ensure 100% accuracy of the data. I would prefer Quicken give us a notice stating Schwab can not supply accurate data and not allow downloads rather than clicking the update button and receive garbage information.

Quicken should only allow automatic updates of data which are 100% accurate. This is a standard which all quicken customers should expect.

MontanaKarl

@jwlpgh we all get to have our opinion of course. For me, getting 98% of my Schwab transactions downloaded correctly is way better than getting none at all. If you have an idea on how Quicken can influence Schwab to provide correctly coded transactions 100% of the time, I’m sure they’d love to hear it. But, Quicken does process what it gets accurately… so has no bugs on their end to fix.

jacobs

I would prefer Quicken give us a notice stating Schwab can not supply accurate data

@jwlpgh Quicken just won't do that. They will never publicly blame a financial institution. If Quicken points a finger at a financial institution, and customers floods the financial institution with complaints, they may decide to simply block access for Quicken rather than deal with programming issues and customer support issues.

Quicken should only allow automatic updates of data which are 100% accurate.

First, Quicken has no viable way to validate whether data is "100% accurate" from each of the 10,000+ institutions that sign on with Intuit, their connectivity service provider. They'd need test accounts with wide-ranging data which changes on an ongoing basis at each financial institution, and a massive team of testers to regularly run tests the validate that data. Quicken is a small company (200-250 employees) and can't possibly do that. When connections break completely, there may be some automated tools which detect and report it, but when data is incomplete or incorrectly encoded, they rely on user reports, which are documented and submitted to Intuit to determine if it's something Intuit can fix in their download processing or if it needs the financial institution to make changes in their formatting to data for download.

Although you might prefer that Quicken cut off a financial institution anytime there's a problem with the way that institution is coding some of its transactions, I'm pretty sure that most Quicken users would prefer downloads with a little manual editing rather than needing to enter everything manually (as @MontanaKarl expressed above).

 I have been a long term user of quicken and expect 100% accurate information from them.

I'm sorry to say you have an unrealistic expectation. Quicken can sometimes massage data from a financial institution to fix a minor problem, but it generally cannot fix incorrectly coded data from a financial institution. Quicken can report a problem to Intuit; Intuit can report a problem to a financial institution, but the rest depends on the financial institution.