No bank & card transactions after download - CONNLOG.txt log says "parse error"

Gabe Tech

Using Quicken Class Business & Personal in windows, starting for the first time in January, my one-step update takes the normal amount of time to complete and activity with each bank and card company — But after all the downloads, I don't see anything about transactions to review.

My investment accounts (Fidelity) have auto-entered transactions, but nothing seems to be downloaded for cards like Chase, Amex, or two credit unions.

Looking in the CONNLOG.txt, it might be associated with:

20250131 09:33:27: Parse error. Current object: Null object

Which first appeared Jan 31, but has repeated in one-step update sessions since then.

Quicken behaves like it does actually download the transactions, but then immediately loses them.

One Step Update Summary is only "Services update" "42 quotes and investing headlines updated" and text in red "You need to select accounts to export".

Clicking the gear and selecting to update a single bank account goes through "Downloading" and then provides a blank update summary.

The only odd state I know of is that I disable cloud sync for my file. Any suggested troubleshooting steps would be appreciated. I'm really not looking forward to removing all my bank connections, doing some sort of cloud sync dance, and re-adding 20 accounts. :-(

NotACPA

Which bank or card company, as known to Q and shown in the "Financial Institution" column at TOOLS, Account List? In that same dialog, what's in the "Transaction Download" column for each referenced account? If a column isn't present, add it via the OPTIONS box.

Next, when you do EDIT, Preferences and click "Downloaded Transactions" are the first to checkboxes (both begin "Automatically add…" checked?

Gabe Tech

Thank you so much for trying to answer & help me, @NotACPA .

Which bank or card company

~All of them except Fidelity. - Schwab, Amex, Cap1, Chase, 2 credit unions

Transaction Download

All the problem accounts show "Transaction Download: yes (Express Web Connect+)" and "yes (Express Web Connect)"

The Fidelity accounts with "Direct Connect" all continued to work correctly.

Automatically add..?

I confirmed this is off for banking registers, which applies to checking/saving/card accounts.

Troubleshooting progress

I noticed Quick was no longer prompting me for my password vault credentials. This led me to manage my password vault and I read that all Express Web Connect (EWC) passwords were now listed as "not required." Reading more, I learned that banking-login-permission is now delegated fully to the third-party aggregator service, which hits banking web services ~daily on my behalf. I imagine this is used to better support online website quicken [which doesn't add value for me.]

My latest theory is that the linkage between my local file, cloud account, and whatever is used to hold EWC(+?) banking login access tokens got out of sync. My client thinks accounts are active and trusts the platform to provide transaction data. But when Quicken Classic tries to download the data, it silently fails. It appears to download info—it definitely takes a long time to sync— but no status or updated data is provided to me in the UI.

I'm not resigned to either "Reset" each account or Deactivate & Reactivate. Which is a huge pain with multiple people and 20+ accounts. It seems I have to do this every 4-5 months.

I wonder if there is something odd about Google Drive backup of the folder locking files at the wrong time or disabling quicken cloud sync.

I really wish the app or logs surfaced some sort of error for this case of client thinking everything is okay but not downloading any transaction data via EWC+.

NotACPA

@Gabe Tech

" I imagine this is used to better support online website quicken [which doesn't add value for me.]"
Actually, it's the FI, not Q or Intuit as Q's aggregator, that decides which download method the FI will support.

I downloaded 2 cards from Chase using EWC+ (at 6:53AM CST today) and I'm not having any problems. which suggests that it could be something with your Q data file. Have you tried Validating the file? SuperValidating? Be sure to take a backup before trying those in that order.

And, as a total aside, your OP shows a 3:01am time. Are you really a night-owl … or in a non-US timezone?

Gabe Tech

3:01am?

Ah, yes. Accurate. Staying up later than usual, for sure. Thanks again for the commentary.

[connection methods and financial institution support]

::nod:: My mental model is:

• Direct Connect = Support Quicken API & username/pass saved on client.
• Web Connect = "manually login to download a .qfx"
• Express Web Connect = "give quicken [intuit?] servers your password to login on your behalf. Maybe webpage-scraping compatible? Most financial instructions these days have a policy against supporting third-party access using passwords — i.e., only the customer should control the password
  • Quicken Connect (Express Web Connect on Mac) seems to be a special case. I imagine it gets some special allowance to no continue working because MacOS Keychain password storage is recognized as "more secure" than a client-app's "vault" ( and is used without an aggregator third-party)
• Express Web Connect+ = Customer goes through financial institution's OAUTH permission delegation workflow (now sometimes conflated with "open banking)", which grants a third-party app (intuit aggregator service?) a token to fetch financial data using supported APIs.
  • This also helps encourage good behavior like "only scrape once a day" and allowing Quicken to download data from the aggregator service rather than directly contacting each financial intuition upon clicking update.
  • I wonder how closely this is linked to the actual File Name, as I've seen support sometimes ask for your actual file name occasionally to help identify server-side logs.
  • My previous post meant to imply that this EWC+ feature /also/ likely is involved in support for Quicken online services, because it seems that Cloud Sync tries to keep online/mobile quicken access needs in sync with PC Quicken. My pain

I should have mentioned that I had tried Validating and super-validating. Maybe there is still something still lurking in my data file, as I seem to have to repeat this dance a couple times a year for the last 5 years.

Weird things about my use:

• I have a couple EWC accounts with competing logins with access to the same credit unions accounts.
• My partner is also an additional user on one of my Amex cards, which does an odd thing where the card shares the same account/till — so I always have to be careful to not add that one twice when resetting accounts and reauthorizing quicken (which always shows "already authorized" in the flows).
• I use google drive to backup my Documents folder. Sometimes it locks files when uploading them. I know this because if i close quicken, and re-open it shortly after, it will give me an error that the file is locked.
• I sometimes click to take a Manual backup.
• Quicken Mobile & Web Sync OFF

I've previously gotten myself into missing transaction download situations before which somehow required me to deactivate all accounts, create a new Quicken file, re-enable sync, delete data, and/or remove the OAUTH quicken authorization for each card before proceeding to add it back in. Sometimes resetting an account will work to download account data once, but then get nothing the following week when I click one-step-update. It's maddening.

It really seems like I am somehow prone to get into a state where the OAUTH authorized EWC+ data collection just stops being correctly funneled to my Quicken Classic.