Scheduled payments for Bank of America are no longer downloading

Niels S said:

@jacobs - does this work for recurring transactions that vary in amount each month - e.g., a credit card bill? I.e., would I then only enter once? 

Yes and no. You'd make one entry in Quicken for the recurring transaction, but it won't automatically pick up the payment amount. You'd have to either edit the amount each month manually, or drag the transaction over the one which downloads from the bank.

Niels S said:

Also, it does not sound like this solves for non-recurring ad-hoc bills? Can you point me to any guidance here?

You can enter the transaction manually in Quicken and let it match the downloaded transaction, if you want to see it in Quicken right away. Or you can pay with bill via BoA and wait for it to download to Quicken when it's paid.

Niels S said:

My view is that the major financial institutions and quicken need to work together to keep the forward looking scheduled transaction data flowing in to quicken.

It's fine that that's the way you want it to work, but that's not the way the world is going. The financial institutions of the world have little incentive to build, maintain and support solutions specific to the small percentage of their customers who use Quicken. They are taking the path of least resistance (and cost) by letting the few major players in the aggregation market serve as the interface to Quicken and dozens of other personal finance programs and websites.

Niels S said:

Without this, quicken becomes a dumb register.

It depends on how you use Quicken and what your expectations are. Your transactions will still flow into Quicken, but you have to do some additional steps. In the past, if you entered a bill to pay via Quicken, you'd see that future-dated payment a week or two or three before it was paid; if you take that away, does it make Quicken worthless to you? That is, if you schedule a payment via BoA and don't see the payment in your Quicken register until it is paid and downloads into Quicken, does not seeing the upcoming payment for the week or two before make Quicken worthless? If so, are you willing to enter your payment transactions in Quicken in addition to BoA?

For me, the real value of Quicken is having all my financial information, current and historical, in one database. I actually manually enter most of my transactions, because I find it doesn't take me much longer than downloading and then editing/adding memos/adding splits — and it avoids any recurring issues with Quicken connectivity. I'm not saying that's the right solution for you or most people, just that there are different ways we all use Quicken and determine if there's value in it for us.