Checking account never reconciles

Question

Hello. I’ve been using Quicken forever. Last year, my bank (Sound Community Bank in Seattle), changed their online system. Afterwards, I could never get my checking account to reconcile automatically. They washed their hands in terms of help and blame Quicken. There are two things that are an issue. The big one is that if there are pending transactions Quicken picks up some of them but not all of them. The account balance pulled in is for the posted transactions. The second problem, but one easy for me to figure out, is that if there are two transactions with the same amount and same vendor, it only picks up one.

Is there anyone that can help?

jacobs · Answer

@DavidG  Quicken can't write special code for every financial institution; it's just too small a company trying to keep up with a vast number of financial institutions. The proper "fix" is to get the financial institution to fix their faulty code so their FITID values conform to the specifications of the OFX standard and work correctly with Quicken. I know it's a pain, but have you documented what you've found to submit to either Quicken (who could escalate to Intuit, who could contact the financial institution) or directly your financial institution's IT department? Things like this are sometimes linger without a cure, but sometimes they do get fixed once they get brought to the attention of the right people.

DavidG · Answer

I have this problem, I've noticed that the difference between the transactions is a single character of the FITID, always in the same place. Quicken could check for that, but they don't, which really sucks.

jacobs · Answer

@jbadallas   This is a community forum and not Quicken Support. One option you have is to call Quicken Support; it's free, but you'll have to wait until Monday.

Regarding the incorrect online balance due to pending transactions, one way to work around that is to not have your reconciliations use the balance downloaded from the bank; instead, manually enter the balance on your monthly bank statement. (That's what I do.)  This takes pending transactions/authorizations out of the picture, since they won't be on your bank statement balance.

The other problem you mention is two transactions with the same amount and same vendor and "it only picks up one." Do you mean that when you download transactions from your bank into Quicken, only one of two transactions shows up in Quicken? That shouldn't be (and normally isn't) the case. Two different transactions with the same payee, the same amount, and even the same date should still download to Quicken if the bank is transmitting them correctly. Every transaction has a unique Financial Institution Transaction IDentification number (FITID), assigned by the financial institution. Quicken uses these FITID numbers to differentiate new transactions from ones it has downloaded previously. If two transactions with the same Payee and Amount have different FITID numbers assigned by the bank, then Quicken will correctly show the duplicates. If that's not happening, it sounds like the bank may be doing something wrong. (If your bank gives you the option of downloading transactions to your computer — an OFX or QFX or Quicken download — you can do a download ad open the file in a text editor to see exactly how these two transactions are encoded. I can help walk you through that if it's something you want to pursue.)

If it's the bank's fault, and you can't get them to see it's their problem to fix, I'm wondering if you can work around it. If you have transactions to the same Payee for the same amount repeatedly, it sounds like you might be able to create scheduled transaction(s) in Quicken to enter these at the appropriate intervals. Even if only one of two transactions downloads, it will match one of your scheduled instances and the other one will be there from the schedule. That might give you a livable way to work around the bank's shortcomings.