QUICKEN CLASSIC MAC DOES NOT DISPLAY CURRENT BALANCE CORRECTLY (SHOWS $0.00)
This is NOT a Lincoln Financial Group problem, it's a problem with QUICKEN mapping/displaying the balance after downloading transactions successfully from Lincoln Financial.
I disconnected mt account and set uo a new one downloading transactions from LINCOLN FINANCIAL RETD SERCVIECES using Quicken Connect. The download process authenticates correctly and displays the account balance correctly during the setup but after finishing the download setup, the balance displays ZERO in Quicken.
I examined the HTTP Log and found the current balance mentioned 33 times in the download transaction exchange. Here area some lines from the Log, todays balance is CORRECT (BOLD BELOW).
RESPONSE BODY:
{
"metaData" : {
"pageSize" : 46,
"offset" : 0,
"currentPage" : 1,
"limit" : 200,
"totalPages" : 1,
"totalSize" : 46,
"asOf" : "2024-08-05T12:26:52Z",
"lastRefId" : "397868958214554880"
},
"resources" : [
{
"ownerId" : "@@@@@@@@@@@@",
"subType" : "401K",
"modifiedAt" : "2024-08-04T12:36:12Z",
"normalizedBalance" : 195711.09,
"recurringTxnDays" : 30, "isConnected" : true,
"lastAggTxnOn" : "2023-09-05",
"onlineBalanceAt" : "2024-08-04T12:36:11Z",
"balanceAsOf" : -14292.620000000001,
"currency" : "USD",
"isNew" : false,
"isNotSynced" : true,
"createdAt" : "2024-07-30T12:57:14Z",
"recurringTxn" : {
"value" : 30,
"unitType" : "DAYS"
},
"cpData" : {
"aggregators" : [
{
"id" : "################",
"onlineBalanceAt" : "2024-08-04T12:36:11Z",
"channel" : "FDP_DEFAULT",
"subType" : "401K",
"onlineBalance" : 195711.09,
"cpLoginId" : "@@@@@@@@@@@@",
"accountNumberMasked" : "*****2",
"accountName" : "DOE,, JOHN",
"lastRefreshSuccessfulAt" : "2024-08-04T12:36:12Z",
"lastAggTxnAt" : "2023-09-05T00:00:00Z",
"cpId" : "##################",
"aggStatus" : "OK",
"lastRefreshAttemptedAt" : "2024-08-04T12:36:12Z"
This started somewhere around the 7.7.1 update or the 7.8.0 update possibly the update immediatly prior to 7.7.1. Can anyone determine what the update before 7.7.1 was?
Comments
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This started somewhere around the 7.7.1 update or the 7.8.0 update possibly the update immediatly prior to 7.7.1. Can anyone determine what the update before 7.7.1 was?
The 2024 releases, in reverse order, have been:
7.8.2
7.8.1
7.8.0
7.7.1
7.7.0
7.6.1
7.6.0
7.5.2
7.5.1
7.5.0I'd note that most connectivity issues with financial institutions are not affected by updates to the Quicken Mac application code; issues which arise are mostly fixed at the server level, either Quicken's or Intuit's. It's likely that the problem you describe happened around the time of one of the updates, was due to not the application update but a change in export syntax from the financial institution requiring an update to Intuit's scripts or Quicken's server code.
Have you called Quicken Support about this issue?
Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 19931 -
yes, they are supposedly working on it.
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Look, I don't care who broke it but either party should be able to take look at the logs and determine why the current balance - that displays during the FI download setup - is not displaying after the account is filed.
This started im May or June and Quicken finally posted an Alert in July. IIRC, one the releases was focused on investments and highlighted all the changes to the investment window, reports, etc. I suspect it started there.
As a paying customer, I expect better.
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I agree that as customers, we don't care who broke something, we just want it fixed. But understanding who and what is involved can help set/adjust your expectations. If the issue involves Intuit and possibly the financial institution, those issues tend not to get fixed terribly quickly, although they do eventually get fixed. If you just "expect better", you set yourself up for ongoing disappointment/frustration, because that's the reality of how things work. 😉
IIRC, one the releases was focused on investments and highlighted all the changes to the investment window, reports, etc. I suspect it started there.
As I noted above, it's pretty unlikely it had anything to do with any update to the Quicken Mac program. There isn't custom code in Quicken Mac for every financial institution. Connectivity/download issues are handled at the background server level, and often out of Quicken's hands. There can be server changes at any time; there are likely tweaks at least weekly, maybe more often — and they are never announced before or after.
Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 19931 -
Looking at this, it struck me as strange:
"normalizedBalance" : 195711.09,"recurringTxnDays" : 30, "isConnected" : true,
"lastAggTxnOn" : "2023-09-05",
"onlineBalanceAt" : "2024-08-04T12:36:11Z",
"balanceAsOf" : -14292.620000000001,You would think that the "Balance As of" would be a date not an amount.
I'm on Windows and this is for Chase but look at what it has for a IRA account:
"subType":"OTHER_BANK","accountName":"IRA","accountNumberMasked":"*******","onlineBalance":1036957.3100,"onlineBalanceAt":"2024-08-05T23:18:05Z",
So, from what I can see the data that Quicken Mac is getting is garbage.
There have been numerous reports on here for Quicken Mac "zero balance", and announcements that has to do with a "web page scraper to OFX" problem. That would be Intuit since with the exception of Direct Connect Quicken never talks directly to the financial institution.
This basically sounds like they are trying to do the same error prone idea that they have for banking financial institutions that won't use any good protocol like Direct Connect. (What Quicken Windows calls Express Web Connect, and it hidden under the name "Quicken Connect" on Quicken Mac). But this time it is with investment accounts which are much more complicated to parse.
EDIT: Just so you know Chase uses what Quicken Windows calls Express Web Connect +, which unlike Express Web Connect it using a standardized protocol called FDX. No "screen scrapping
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BALANCE has 708 entries in the http log created during the Lincoln account setup.
BALANCE Prefixes include CURRENT, ONLINE and NORMALIZED.
BALANCE Suffixes include AT, ASOF and ON
195766.29 (todays balance) is associated with ONLINEBALANCE, NORMALIZEDBALANCE and MARKET VALUE 38 times in the same log. The Quicken account setup utility is using one of these fields to display the balance (screen shot above) but looses it when filing/updating the account.
I know what you're saying. This is why I (and , clearly, so many other users) get frustrated with Quicken Support posting comments to contact the vendor. Lincoln and AMEX Savings have no idea who or what Quicken is other than providing a QFX formatted download from Web Connect. If it were a Direct Connect issue, yes, the vendor would offer support and assistance (as Wells Fargo Bank does). This is a 100% Quicken problem.
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This is a 100% Quicken problem.
To you as a Quicken customer, it's absolutely 100% a Quicken problem — because it isn't working.
In terms of resolving the problem, though, it's definitely not 100% a Quicken problem. It's likely to be mostly or entirely an Intuit problem. And it is possibly the financial institution's problem if their QFX output is incorrect.
If it's on Intuit to fix it, Quicken is at their mercy to get it done. Intuit has a large queue of connectivity issues, which is not surprising considering they deal with 10,000+ financial institutions and financial institutions are always making changes to their websites and back-end servers. So problems get dealt with in some order — probably partly FIFO and partly priority-based on the size of the financial institution — but the speed with which they get resolved can be frustrating for end users. Quicken has little to no role in this, and I'd guess generally doesn't even have insight into exactly what is happening (or not) on each issue. So while Quicken is ultimately responsible to their customers, they have little/no control over Intuit's work.
And if Intuit investigates and finds there's a problem with the QFX output from the financial institution, they they need to make contact with the the financial institution, explain the problem, and then wait for the financial institution to prioritize and implement a fix. Sometimes that gets done in a day or two; sometimes it can take weeks. And in those cases, neither Quicken nor Intuit have any control over getting a fix in place until the financial institution does their part.
Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 19931 -
well, Lincoln does not offer a QFX download. Amex SAVINGS does, and it works fine - and the Quicken Connect for SAVINGS is still broken.
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well, Lincoln does not offer a QFX download.
I'm sorry I wasn't clear enough speaking about QFX downloads. When you use Quicken Connect, the financial institution is sending a QFX file to Quicken's server (through Intuit). In other words, whether you download an actual QFX file to your computer and then import it into Quicken, or you use Quicken Connect to download to Quicken's server and then to your desktop Quicken, the data coming from the financial institution is formatted as a QFX file.
In any case, I wasn't trying to offer information on either of your specific financial institutions, only to explain why these connectivity problems can be complex, involving two or three parties, and take a frustratingly long time to get resolved that Quicken can't do anything about.
Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 19930 -
@jacobs I beg to differ. Maybe I'm mistaking what you are saying, but the financial institution isn't providing the data in QFX data in any shape or form.
Yes, by the time it gets to Quicken Mac it is in that form (sort of, I notice that it isn't really actually holding to the full protocol), but isn't starting out from the financial institution that way.
As @Quicken Jasmine states in this old announcement:
This is happening because our OFX Screenscrape (a form of Express Web Connect/Quicken Connect) is able to successfully capture account details but unable to capture account activity.
"screenscrape" implies reading the HTML/Website not any kind of file that the financial institution is generating. And even if the financial institution was providing the data in a file, it is highly unlikely they would use the OFX standard. The OFX standard is quite complex, and the more likely format would be a simple CSV format that Intuit's servers (as Quicken Inc's "aggregator") would have to somehow convert to the format that Quicken Mac needs.
This kind of problem is "new to investment accounts", but far from new to "Express Web Connect".
Quicken Mac went with an all encompassing term of "Quicken Connect", and from what I can tell it has a few more "tricks" than Quicken Windows (this kind of download isn't currently supported on Quicken Windows), so I like the much more descriptive terms that Quicken Windows uses.
Web Connect is simply the financial institution creating a data file with the "response" part of Direct Connect/QFX when it would ask for the downloading of the transaction information.
So, Express Web Connect implies that the original idea was to just log in as the user to the financial institutions and download a QFX file that the financial institution provides. But there is a major problem with that, only a very few financial institutions provide the QFX especially if they don't provide Direct Connect. So, that quickly evolved into Intuit working out "agreements" with each financial institution (or the service provider they use for their website) of what how they can get that data. That can be anything from some kind of web protocol, or a file or as a last resort "screenscaping". Screen scraping is a very bad way to have to try to get this data. At any time, the financial institution can change their website and then they can't get the data.
Given the widespread "zero balance" problems I see posted for Quicken Mac investment accounts I would suspect that there is a bug in a "general" part of the "scripting" Intuit is using, but it certainly could also be something that a lot of these financial institutions do on their websites that make it hard for that "script" to get the data, and they might be faced with customizing at least part of the script for a given financial institution.
That is the major flaw in trying to provide a service in this manner. It is done because they have no choice (the financial institutions will not standardize), but it can mean that they will be constantly chasing problems like this.
But I totally agree I don't think that Quicken Inc can't do anything about this, other than bug Intuit to fix it. Which may or may not involve Intuit bugging the financial institution to make some kind of change to make it possible. Or even just letting them know before hand when a change they are going to make to their website will affect this. But to me this is an unreasonable expectation on anyone that believes that the financial institution is going to do this. First off, just deciding if any given change will break the Intuit "screenscraping" is highly complex, but in the second place I don't think the financial institutions consider this Quicken support to be all that important. The number of Quicken users at any given financial institution is tiny.
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BTW I have a lot of respect for the Quicken Mac programmers. I totally believe that if the only problem was that Quicken Mac isn't reading the right fields in the downloaded data, they would have fixed that long ago. The fact that that hasn't happen tells me that it isn't that, and it is out of their hands to fix it. It isn't like this is a "low priority bug" when you have numerous users reporting this kind of problem with many different financial institutions.
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I used to have 5 accounts in Quicken, alll downloading via Direct or Quicken Connect. I now have 2 that are no longer updating transactions. I will not be renewing my annual Quicken subscription for 3 accounts. I may as well just download csv files manually - might even be able to put together an Automator “watch me do” script I can schedule.
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I think Quicken uses a variety of methods to get information from financial institutions. They download a QFX file or use some other method of directly transferring the information when they can, and resort to screen scraping when they have to. I would not assume just because they appear to be scraping with one institution that they're doing that everywhere.
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@Jon absolutely, I'm sure they try to use the best method they can. My experience with express webconnect is that for some financial institution it was Rock solid. For others it was always iffy. I think it really depends on exactly what the financial institution provides.
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Sorry, I didn't realize this had been documented as a financial institution where screen-scraping was in use, so my comments about downloading QFX transaction data were indeed wrong. But the larger picture I was trying to convey is unchanged: Quicken is at the mercy of Intuit to catch up to any changes made by financial institutions; sometimes Intuit can do this on their own, and sometimes it requires some cooperation from the financial institution. So I think we're on the same page. 😉
Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 19931 -
Here we are almost 2 months later…..
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