Does the Quicken Cloud update its data directly from my banks, not just from the app on my PC?

SetSee

BACKGROUND to my question:  I’m playing with the latest Quicken Deluxe for Windows using a 2nd PC and a restored backup file from my 1st PC, before committing to upgrading my to the current 2013 version—I am cautious because I have 30 years of Quicken data that is very important to me, and so much has changed in the program from the 2013 version to the current one, and I do not yet understand how many things work.

I am nearly ready to make the final conversion/upgrade to Quicken-2025 but have run into something strange on my last testing.  I was checking my to-do list for getting my Preferences set correctly before my Big Move and was looking for where the Preference option to sync an account to Quicken on the Web was located…. as part of this, I wanted to look at what the latest transactions were, for 1 account (an AmEx credit card), on both my phone and on the app.quicken.com webpage version of my data.  The latter 2 have transactions from more recent days (03/27 or 03/30) but my register in the Quicken app on my PC-2 only has data up to 03/20, as I have not downloaded transactions since (NOTE: the top of register says the last download was on 03/16 at 5:44 pm, which is another anomaly that I do not understand).   These 3 screenshot images show this discrepancy:

#1 – the register for the AmEx account in the PC version of Quicken:

#2 – the register for the AmEx account on the cloud:

#3 – the register for the AmEx account in the Quicken Classic companion App on my phone

From all the reading I’ve done of Quicken’s online Help pages, I thought that the Sync to Web feature of Quicken on the Web synced data from the app on my PC to the Quicken cloud, but the above screenshots’ data makes me think that Quicken on the cloud is updating its data regularly from my banks.  Can someone explain this?  I have never read a single sentence in many Quicken help pages that implies, let alone states clearly, the the data stored in the Quicken Cloud is updated directly from banks.

Chris_QPW

The answer is it syncs from both. This is probably one of the main reasons why it’s complicated and error prone.

one might wonder why the cloud is syncing from the financial institutions.

a case that shows why. You go on a vacation and you want to use the mobile or Web app to monitor your finances and you don’t want to take a PC with you. Clearly there has to be a way to get new transactions in this used case. And as a convenience, the updates are done periodically.

now bring in the use case that you wanna update from the desktop application. There has to be a system that merges those two together so you don’t have duplicates and such.

SetSee

Chris, thanks for the answer; I appreciate your help.

So, my hunch was right, I can see the value of it, as you mention—quite useful, actually..

But I remain amazed that the product managers for the product don't put some decent effort into helpful documentation. and ensure that this behavior is mentioned in the UI on the mobile & Web tab, like maybe here:

Chris_QPW

That would be a good addition. You can suggest it by going to the Home page on this forum and selecting New Post → New Idea. That way it will get more visibility than buried in a thread like this.