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.QFX Import from Vanguard results incorrectly assigned reinvestment transaction categories

jerry8kogan

Quicken Classic for Windows, R65.29.

Many months ago I stopped trying to do a One Step Update from Vanguard and downloaded a .qfx file containing all recent account transactions. Then I would doubleclick on that and Quicken would import all of the transactions. The last successful import wa on Dec. 3. However when I tried the import on Jan 3, there were no errors, but transactions which documented reinvestments were all assigned to the ReinvInt activity category, when they should have been assigned to either ReinvLg, ReinvSh, or ReinvDiv category.

Since all of my accounts are set up for automatic reinvestment of dividends and capital gains, almost all of the downloaded transactions were reinvestment transactions, and I had to go into every one and edit it, filling in the amount and # of shares in the correct capital gain or dividend category, and deleting them from the Interest category. Because my wife and I have a lot of stocks and funds in brokerage, IRA, and Roth accounts, this problem changed the import from a straightforward process to one that dragged on for many hours, requiring a lot of attention to avoid typing errors.

Found nothing in the QFX log. Tried to make headway with the OFX log, but could not see any obvious differences between last month's import and the latest one. As far as I could see, transactions were correctly labeled in the memo field of the OFX log. A Quicken support person, blamed Vanguard. I'm sure a Vanguard support person will blame Quicken. Any help would be appreciated.

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Comments

q_lurker

I noticed for my recent OSU download from Vanguard, all my reinvestment came in as ReinvDiv actions rather than reflecting LT or ST CG distributions. The memo field reflected the correct info. As a OSU action, I see that all as Vanguard’s responsibility.

My corrective actions were to edit the transactions and more simply copy the dollar and share numbers from the Dividend line to the correct line. No typing involved.

I have not addressed this with Vanguard.

jerry8kogan

Thanks for the hint on your corrective actions. After doing 30 - 40 in a row, I'd be getting fatigued, and occasionally replace decimals with commas without catching it. That tended to play havoc with the overall share count. Doing it as a cut and paste is quicker and easier, but there is still the time lag as Quicken saves each change.

Quicken is going to blame it on Vanguard and vice versa. Vanguard is responsible for producing the OfxDownload.qfx and Quicken is responsible for importing it. I'll see if I can find a free xml editor which indents the text and and then search for any differences between the tags used on Reinvested Capital Gains' transactions in last month's OfxDownload.qfx file vs this month's file. If I can find a difference then I can point to Vanguard, if not then it's Quicken that's responsible. At either place, actually getting through to someone knowledgeable enough to deal with it, is going to be a nightmare.

jerry8kogan

I think I found the source of the problem, and it does appear to be Vanguard's fault. I pulled up the current OfxDownload.qfx parsed out the reinvest transactions in an editor looking for ones that were capital gain reinvestments, then did the same for and OfxDownload.qfx from early July where I was also able to find a reinvest capital gains transaction. One field had a different value in the two files. In the Jan 3, 2026 file <INCOMETYPE> was defined as MISC. In the older file <INCOMETYPE> for the same type of transaction was DIV. In fact this was the case with all of the Reinvestment transactions. <INCOMETYPE> which always had been marked as DIV was now marked as MISC. If anyone knows how to get through to someone technical at Vanguard please give me a name and number.

Jim_Harman

In Direct Connect downloads, Vanguard has miscategorized reinvested Capital Gains distributions as ReinvDivs for years, this is not a new problem.

BarryMo

I contacted Vanguard on this issue almost a year ago. I got bounced around for 9 -10 months with like 5 - 6 tickets. I finally got pissed enough and escalated to the CEO where an escalation manager has been assigned. I get an update almost weekly. Their IT team is trying to fix, but they are sort of clueless (I do know they have had some consultations with Quicken too). In fact, one of the changes they made broke all of the Vanguard downloads a few weeks ago! Their latest attempt converted everything from ReinvDiv and ReinvInt. They asked me to validate and I indicated it took me less than 10 seconds to see the issue when looking at the qfx file.

I have provided qfx snippets that show how capital gains should be encoded based on another FI that also uses direct connect.

They have implied that they will only fix this for downloads and not direct connect because they will be migrating off direct connect some time in the future.

q_lurker

@BarryMo Thanks for your perseverance on this issue with Vanguard and your concise summary of the status.