A Perspective on ongoing Quicken/Vanguard Issues
I've read of all sorts of frustration and irritation about the ongoing Vanguard/Quicken issue. IMO everyone should relax, take a deep breath, and relax- the world has not come to an end and this will get fixed in due time. Meanwhile, accept the fact that:
- Quicken is a service entirely dependent on the cooperation and support of third party financial institutions
- 3rd third party financial institutions have absolutely no obligation to provide and support the interface to Quicken. You will not find these anywhere in their terms and conditions/agreements with you. And if they did, they certainly do not have a Service Level Agreement (SLA) to rectify a Quicken interface issue within a certain amount of time. Their priority is rightfully on their own proprietary interface and web GUI, which of course continues to be available to you and is probably more accurate and rich compared to what you are getting from them via Quicken. If you are dependent solely on Quicken to provide your awareness on your financial accounts, I respectfully say that you are foolish.
- Nonetheless, these companies want to provide a value add Quicken interface their customers will be happy with. At the same time, are hyper-focused on cyber defense and protecting your data. Each company has a proprietary interface that needs to be adapted to Quicken's, and they will take their sweet time to get right, because they can.
All that said, is your historical transaction really lost? Did you set up your account to backup your last X files like quicken recommends so that you resume downloading transactions once this issue is resolved, without losing your historical data? Have you/did you check your backup preferences?
As far as the loss of historical transactions, IMO this is more Quicken’s fault for not having a better and more informative user experience for preserving historical data when there are changes in account types. Further, interoperability is not as easy as it sounds- it takes a lot of cooperation, communication, and thorough test processes. I wonder if Quicken has reliable test harnesses/processes and technical “hand-holders” and the awareness to help 3rd party financial institutions transition to new Quicken interfaces.
You chose Quicken as your aggregator for a reason, and you are naive if you think there aren’t going to be bumps in the road, some larger and longer than others. You also chose Vanguard for a reason, and it wasn’t because of its interface to Quicken. Stay the course, this will get fixed soon.
My two cents. Ready to receive flying rocks.
SRM
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@usnavy1610 I think your perspective is right on target. I do understand why people are upset to have their Vanguard connectivity disrupted, but there are short-term workarounds (including, gasp!, entering transactions manually for a few weeks), or simply waiting for a resolution.
All that said, is your historical transaction really lost?
I want to clarify this issue that no historical transactions are lost. What has happened is that users have tried switching from the disabled Direct Connect connection to Quicken Connect; Quicken Connect supports only "Simple Tracking", so it hides the entire Transactions tab. But it does not delete all the transactions! All that's necessary to see that they are still there is to disconnect the account from downloading, and then select Detail Tracking. Voila! All the transactions are still there (plus a few Add/Remove Shares transactions Quicken created in the switch to Direct Connect).
I used to have Vanguard accounts but don't currently; here's how I would be approaching this. Don't use Quicken Connect. Simply disconnect the account from downloading. I would just wait to see if this gets resolved in the next week or two. If I needed to see what's happening in my Vanguard accounts I condo so on the Vanguard website in the interim. If that's not viable, then I'd either (a) download transactions from Vanguard as a QFX file and import them into Quicken, or (b) enter transactions manually. The latter seems untenable for many people, but I've done it for many years. If you have hundreds of securities and many hundreds of transactions each month, this might not be something worth tackling, but if you have 100 or fewer transactions in a month, it is doable (albeit tedious).
Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 19930 -
If you had Direct Connect & Detailed Tracking already set up before this problem started, and you haven't changed anything since, I don't see any benefit to disconnecting it now - just leave it as it & it should start working again when Vanguard gets things fixed. I would only advise disconnecting your Vanguard account if you switched it over to Quicken Connect with Simple Tracking & don't like losing access to your account register.
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In general people do more harm with trying to "workaround" the problems by disconnecting accounts and such (I have seen this many times on the Windows side).
I will mention that staying in Simple investment mode has a risk of losing transactions over the long hall.
What Simple mode is doing is looking at the summary information that comes down with the transactions and using add/remove shares and misc transactions to track just the shares/cash. If you are in Simple mode for long enough there is a chance that you will get past the point where the window for downloading older transactions has passed. And therefore, they might never be downloaded.
I don't know if you get this message in Quicken Mac, but the above is the reason this message is displayed when switching to Simple mode in Quicken Windows.
I will also say that at this point there have been several financial institutions that have switched to the new connection method. Some let you keep Direct Connect, and some don't. But what I definitely see almost every time is that there is a period of time where things aren't working as expected and it causes people a lot of frustration, but it usually gets resolved within a few weeks.
EDIT: And BTW the ones that tend to "feel the most pain" are the "early adopters" of the new connection method.
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Update… the error messages appear to have cleared up for me for the first time since 2/20. Can this be real? Anyone else seeing this?
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I just did an update, and didn't get any errors… for the first time in quite a while. There were not any transactions to download, so I'm not really sure if it's working or not, but it looks promising.
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In response to usnavy 1610…Although I respect your perspective and understand Quicken depends on the cooperation of brokerage houses, banks, and other financial institutions, we have large sums invested through several different brokerages and banks. I am a retired CPA with many years of investment experience and follow many of the fundamentals of the Oracle of Omaha. I manage our accounts. Workarounds aside, if Vanguard chooses not to put a priority on getting this resolved, we will without hesitation move those investments to another house. This glitch aside, Vanguard is and has been the only institution I have trouble with when reconciling month-end balances. Fidelity, T Rowe Price, Allspring, and 4 different banks have never been an issue.
I would urge others in our position to consider putting pressure on Vanguard to fix this. It would only take a few thousand of us to put a $4-5 Billion dent in Vanguard's balance sheet. This will get their attention. I urge you to call them and join us in applying some pressure.
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It's already fixed, so no more complaining is needed.
I did get a couple new transactions downloaded this evening.
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I don't have new transactions, but I just connected with no error message
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I'm not so forgiving of Vanguard. All too often a financial institution makes an unplanned change to their interface and quicken is left to scramble to try to get things working again. Over the last few years I have found Vanguard's technical support to be lacking. Just try calling and asking to be connected to technical support. It won't happen, they will write a summary of your complaint, tell you it will be sent to a technical support backroom, and you will never hear from tech support. I don't like it when two companies pass the buck. Vanguard should have worked with Quicken to get the new interface developed and tested before rolling it out. They both bear responsibility for the abrupt connection loss, the poor rollout of web express along with a cavalier change over to a simple account view. Personally, I would disconnect Quicken from Vanguard and go back to downloading directly from Vanguard website until and if the web express interface supports complex view. Vanguard is the largest investment firm in the country and Quicken is one of the most popular tools for personal financial accounting. Vanguard is trying to save a few cents by abandoning Direct Connect, which has worked great for years. If they cared about their customers, the implementation would have been better.
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Today, Sat., March 8th, 2025. I am proud to announce I can now resume successful updates from my vanguard account through normal channels without any error [OL-295-A] appearing. WHEW!
I am using the latest version of Quicken for Windows.
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A good perspective.
This has been my approach with my Vanguard setup during this period: I have not disconnected my Direct Connect, it remains connected. However, I just removed Vanguard from the One Step Update settings so that Quicken does not attempt to download - hence eliminated the download errors. Then once a week, I log into the Vanguard site via my browser to manually download the QFX file and import it into Quicken. Everything has worked perfect. Less convenient of course, but 1 extra minute of work and all done correctly.
I have never had any issues with Vanguard of any sorts, so have no plans to make any changes. And in no way Quicken is a factor in what FI I choose to do business with. Quicken is simply a tool and I have planned my finances to live without it if needed.
Glad to see some positive news and I will wait as is for another week or two until everyone gives their thumbs up.
- QWin Deluxe user since 2010, US subscription on Win11
- I don't use Cloud Sync, Mobile & Web, Bill Pay/Mgr1 -
I hadn't come to see the community comments before reconnecting my Vanguard accounts. I wish I had. Thank you to everyone who posts.
Upon reconnection, I was immediately disappointed by the fact that the Vanguard accounts were switched automatically to Simple Investing tracking mode. When I tried to figure out how to switch back to Complete Investing mode, I found the following information in Quicken. I followed the instructions and was able to change everything back, but ONLY if I don't hook up my accounts to Vanguard for auto-updating. This is a Vanguard thing, and can only be addressed if we all complain to Vanguard.
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Wow! How did a financial institution like Vanguard think that "Simple investing mode" is "good enough"?
I can understand it from "non-financial institutions" those "new kids on the block" like crypto or something, but Vanguard?
That is ridiculous.
And just so people know, there isn't anything stopping an investment financial institution from supporting Complete mode, Schwab and Chase for instance do.
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The first line of the screenshot image is somewhat misleading in my opinion. It implies that EWC is synonymous with Simple Investing. That is not correct since there are other brokerages that support Complete Investing via EWC - Schwab being one of many.
In this case, perhaps? Vanguard has decided to only support Simple Investing from now on (assuming that is the case going forward which is TBD). So a more accurate sentence would've been something like "Vanguard has discontinued Direct Connect and now uses EWC. Also Vanguard no longer supports the Complete Investing option and instead provides only the Simple Investing tracking method"
- QWin Deluxe user since 2010, US subscription on Win11
- I don't use Cloud Sync, Mobile & Web, Bill Pay/Mgr0 -
I'm seeing conflicting reports (from the Windows thread). It seems that some people are still on Direct Connect and getting complete mode, and others are on Express Web Connect + and getting simple mode.
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One key factor in "getting Complete mode back" that seems to being reported in the Windows thread is going to backup before all the problems started. If I had to make a guess on why this works for these people, and for some they didn't have to do anything, I would guess that the people that didn't have to do anything left everything alone while the problems were going on and as such stayed on Direct Connect. Whereas the others deactivate and reactivated accounts and ended up with Express Web Connect + (Which Quicken Mac calls Quicken Connect).
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I've not wanted to deal with downloading and importing manually, so I've been waiting. This morning the popup re ongoing Vanguard issues still appeared, but actually everything was working fine. Transactions from the past several weeks downloaded with no errors. Hopefully we can move on to other things now.
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Is Direct Connect not working on the Windows side? Because it's working fine for me now on the Mac & still provides Detailed Tracking.
As for Simple Tracking, I think I would have actually preferred that for my 401K back when I was working - I had no interest in keeping track of all the individual fund purchases that happened each paycheck, I just wanted to know what the account was worth. But I don't think I would want it in any other circumstance.
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I saw the "its fixed" announcement this morning. My Vanguard 401(k) had lost it's online process settings during the downtime. In that same period, I moved my 401(k) into other Vanguard investment options (Traditional and Roth IRAs). As I have attempted to get reconnected, I did get the simple investing connection to only one of the 3 accounts, a Tranditional IRA. I disconnected and started over from scratch after verifying (and changing if needed) that my Quicken Vanguard accounts were all set up for the Complete - Positions and Transactions Tracking method, the IRA is now connected via Direct Connect.
So far, there is no recognition of the other two accounts by Vanguard or Quicken (I suspect Vanguard). I will wait a day or two to see if that changes. In the meantime, I have simply downloaded transactions from Vanguard and imported into Quicken.
As @JFLeafus said, I also don't mind moving my Vanguard Funds to other vendors. I never see issues with them but over the long term, I have constantly had connection issues with Vanguard.
Win 11 Pro - Quicken Premier - v61.21
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it’s fixed, but a lot of people have accidentally switched over to express Web connect/quicken connect, and can only get simple investing mode since Vanguard has an implemented complete mode for it. And the steps to get back to Direct Connect are a bit more complicated on Windows.
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I can also confirm that my Quicken is now able work with Vanguard using the Direct Connect method. I made no changes to my Vanguard account entry in my Quicken file during this period. I downloaded a QFX file a couple of days ago with some transactions so there were no outstanding transactions. I am expecting some transactions at COB on Monday though.
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Premier/Windows
Vanguard started downloading this morning. I left my accounts alone during this period, so, my account is still using Direct Connect and error went away. No transactions to download yet. Will report back if there is a problem. For now all is good.
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It sounds like it's working for some but not for me. I was one of the folks that deactivated online updates for 1 Vanguard account but not our second one. The deactivated one will not go back to doing a 'complete' download to the register. It consistently goes back to that simple download to that annoying dashboard. The one I left alone seems fine and downloaded transactions from 2/28 thru 3/5. Does anyone know how to 'fix' an account that was deactivated during this mess? Thanks so much.
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RE: Does anyone know how to 'fix' an account that was deactivated during this mess?
Give this a try and let us know if it works:
Deactivate that specific Vanguard account. Then go to Tools > Add Account > do not select Vanguard, but type Vanguard > Select "Advanced Options" on the lower right > Next > Continue > now you should be able to select Direct Connect
- QWin Deluxe user since 2010, US subscription on Win11
- I don't use Cloud Sync, Mobile & Web, Bill Pay/Mgr0 -
@BK , Like @LladyDiane I deactivated one Vanguard account and not the other during the 'black-out' Now the deactivated one will not go back to doing a 'complete' download to the register. I tried @BK's suggestion, but no luck. Thanks for the suggestion and deatiled instructions, though. Open to any other recommendations until Vanguard/Quicken get their act together.
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@achin What part of the procedure failed for you? Right now, Vanguard is only supporting Complete if you are using Direct Connect. If the connection type is Quicken Connect, then you will only get Simple mode.
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@achin , This has nothing to do with Quicken at this time. It is all up to Vanguard to get its act together, and no one knows what, how and when that will be. Maybe they will discontinue Direct Connect, complete investing or not, etc. All unknown and speculations. Until Vanguard finalize their act, Quicken cannot take any actions. And whatever Vanguard does, it is possible that many others are doing and/or will do in the future as well. Industry seems to be heading to EWC+
I have decided to download and import the QFX file from Vanguard thru end of this month (or next) once a week and see what develops next - just to be on the safe side.
Are you on Windows or Mac?
In a test file, I was able to verify the instructions I wrote above successfully and all worked fine for me. So my test file connects via Direct Connect and downloads all of my Vanguard accounts and transactions in complete investing method. I can suggest three more things:
- Ensure that in your Preferences > Investments, the "Default to Simple Investing for new accounts" box is unckecked.
- Create a new test file and add Vanguard to it with the steps I outlined earlier and see if that works. If that works, then the following should work too:
- In situations where we deactivate an account, typically it is recommended to deactivate ALL accounts (including any hidden ones) for a given financial institution. i.e. if you have 3 accounts at Vanguard, you deactivate all 3 first, wait a day, and then reconnect them back. However, given that some are working for you while others are not, I am hesitant to suggest this so that you don't make it worse. Up to you if you want to try this as your last straw.
hope it works.
- QWin Deluxe user since 2010, US subscription on Win11
- I don't use Cloud Sync, Mobile & Web, Bill Pay/Mgr1 -
I will point out, that this is in fact a Quicken Mac thread.
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LOL - didn't realize that. My sincere apologies to all. Thanks for pointing that out @Chris_QPW
- QWin Deluxe user since 2010, US subscription on Win11
- I don't use Cloud Sync, Mobile & Web, Bill Pay/Mgr0
