Hiccup in Electronic Banking

[NW-Bound]

As y'all know, I am proud of having my finances all tracked and updated by Quicken. Well, most of my accounts are, except for a few. One of the accounts neglected was my Amazon Visa card.

This card was tracked on Quicken, but then there was some problem with the connection, and Quicken stopped updating this account some time in 2019. But I still use this card to pay for Amazon purchases. And there were some hiccups with the download connection, and I got frustrated and did not continually pursue it. Some of Quicken users know about the similar hassle with Schwab download, and it can be maddening.

Now, you will ask how the card balance gets paid monthly. Enter my wife/secretary. I set up it up so that the monthly bill goes to her email instead of mine. I buy stuff, and she pays the bill for me. It works well.

Just yesterday, I decided to re-establish the Quicken login for this account. It then downloaded all the missing transactions since 2019. And it showed I had a credit of $43.43 in the account. Hmmm... We are not in the habit of overpaying the bill, so how could the account have extra money?

I logged in to the Visa account with a Web browser, and saw that the account balance was really 0. What's going on?

What I found out is that in 2019, my wife made a payment of $43.43 from our banking account to this Visa account. Our bank statement showed that this money left the banking account. Quicken noted this transaction, and credited it to the Amazon Visa account. However, I looked at old statements from Amazon Visa, and it did not show this money being received.

The following month, this missing $43.43 amount was added to the new monthly balance, and my wife paid it off. So, this $43.43 transaction was "lost" in transit. Quicken indeed shows this transaction as "not cleared" in the Visa account, but "cleared" in our banking account.

It's been 3 years, so there's no point in trying to get this money back. But I find it interesting that this kind of error happens.

Have any of you seen something like this?

PS. What took me a while to track this down was that since that missing payment, I also made two purchases, and the amounts were also incidentally $43.43. This added a bit of confusion, and I initially thought Amazon might have double charged on these purchases.

 

[COcheesehead]

We are pretty paranoid about tracking expenses and payments. I check our credit card linked to Fidelity almost daily. I also get text messages for all transactions. I track credits, I make sure payments are credited. I use three credit monitoring services. I want everything to balance each month. Yes, I am that guy. Anal by habit.

 

[SecondCor521]

I saw a hiccup sort of like that once, but in the opposite way, and with a check, not an ACH payment.

I wrote a check from my brokerage MMA to pay off a credit card. The amount was in the $1K to $2K range. The credit card credited my payment, and the brokerage account mailed me the canceled check. But my brokerage account was never debited.

Long story short, they claimed it would work itself out, it never did, they researched it, and finally after I made a big deal about it they debited my account. Had I not made a big deal about it, I probably could have kept the money (it took six to nine months to get to that point).

 

[NW-Bound]

We are pretty paranoid about tracking expenses and payments. I check our credit card linked to Fidelity almost daily. I also get text messages for all transactions. I track credits, I make sure payments are credited. I use three credit monitoring services. I want everything to balance each month. Yes, I am that guy. Anal by habit.

I know I should be, and am trying to be better.

But the truth is I spend a lot of time watching my stock positions each day to decide which one to sell a call option on, and I find that to be more fun.

Another account that I neglected was a long-time account I had directly with an MF. They still do not have Quicken download, hence I have to log in manually to get dividend payout. And I neglected it for a couple of years, and one day decided to compare the few MFs I still have. Found the performance of this MF to be quite lousy, as shown on Quicken and discovered I had not entered its dividend (and this is an income fund with high dividend yield too).

And I often forget about the monthly interests of my I bonds.

 

[NW-Bound]

I saw a hiccup sort of like that once, but in the opposite way, and with a check, not an ACH payment.

I wrote a check from my brokerage MMA to pay off a credit card. The amount was in the $1K to $2K range. The credit card credited my payment, and the brokerage account mailed me the canceled check. But my brokerage account was never debited.

Long story short, they claimed it would work itself out, it never did, they researched it, and finally after I made a big deal about it they debited my account. Had I not made a big deal about it, I probably could have kept the money (it took six to nine months to get to that point).

Kind of weird that they did not care about "their" money.

I guess it might take too much work, and the workers there did not care about their employer's money either.

 

[SecondAttempt]

I'm also an avid Quicken user and like everything to be just right. Recently Chase implemented some sort of new authentication procedure that required reauthorizing my accounts (all credit card). Doing this created new quicken accounts.

I had to manually copy 15-25 years of transactions from the old accounts to the new accounts. Quicken failed this miserably and initially wanted me to click 2-3 times on each one to confirm, confirm I wanted to move a reconciled transaction, and confirm again because it was more than a year away. Eventually I figured out that I could unclear each transaction and get things moved faster. It was still a mind-numbing PITA! I had tens of thousands of transaction to deal with.

Then I found that numerous transactions were missing or duplicated and had to manually go through to search for duplicates and look at statements to identify missing transactions.

You had a hiccup. I had a full-blown proectile vomiting event on my hands. It took me literally over 3 days of work to get things sorted out and reconciled again. Ultimately there was one account I could not get to balance and did not have the old statements for so I had to put in a fake transaction ~15 years ago to get the balance right.

Now Quicken fails to recognize that I have already reauthorized Chase and transactions are downloading normally. But I am scared to death to let it reathorize again!

I have used Quicken for a long time, at least 25 years and possibly close to 30. But I definitely have a love-hate relationship. I feel like they have horribly bungled this change in Chase authorization.

 

[COcheesehead]

I know I should be, and am trying to be better.

But the truth is I spend a lot of time watching my stock positions each day to decide which one to sell a call option on, and I find that to be more fun.

Another account that I neglected was a long-time account I had directly with an MF. They still do not have Quicken download, hence I have to log in manually to get dividend payout. And I neglected it for a couple of years, and one day decided to compare the few MFs I still have. Found the performance of this MF to be quite lousy, as shown on Quicken and discovered I had not entered its dividend (and this is an income fund with high dividend yield too).

And I often forget about the monthly interests of my I bonds.

Our credit card transactions are only a handful a week and one payment at the end of the billing period. I can take my eyes off the market for a couple minutes to make sure things are correct. I caught fraud on the account before my credit card company once. With alerts on the account, it’s pretty easy to know if something isn’t right.

I also stopped using Quicken years ago due to too many hitches. I developed a rather simple spreadsheet that I update a few times a week. It lets me see income in real time, stress text my portfolio, a whole bunch of stuff for an anal guy like me.

 

[cathy63]

I'm also an avid Quicken user and like everything to be just right. Recently Chase implemented some sort of new authentication procedure that required reauthorizing my accounts (all credit card). Doing this created new quicken accounts.

I had to manually copy 15-25 years of transactions from the old accounts to the new accounts. Quicken failed this miserably and initially wanted me to click 2-3 times on each one to confirm, confirm I wanted to move a reconciled transaction, and confirm again because it was more than a year away. Eventually I figured out that I could unclear each transaction and get things moved faster. It was still a mind-numbing PITA! I had tens of thousands of transaction to deal with.

Then I found that numerous transactions were missing or duplicated and had to manually go through to search for duplicates and look at statements to identify missing transactions.

You had a hiccup. I had a full-blown proectile vomiting event on my hands. It took me literally over 3 days of work to get things sorted out and reconciled again. Ultimately there was one account I could not get to balance and did not have the old statements for so I had to put in a fake transaction ~15 years ago to get the balance right.

Now Quicken fails to recognize that I have already reauthorized Chase and transactions are downloading normally. But I am scared to death to let it reathorize again!

I have used Quicken for a long time, at least 25 years and possibly close to 30. But I definitely have a love-hate relationship. I feel like they have horribly bungled this change in Chase authorization.

I think I would have restored my last backup and waited a week before trying again. I didn't get around to doing the Chase conversion until Quicken had reminded me a couple of times and it was working fine by then with no duplicate accounts or transactions. So if you have automated backups turned on and still have a file from before the conversion, you might want to try again.

 

[ERD50]

Now, you will ask how the card balance gets paid monthly. Enter my wife/secretary. I set up it up so that the monthly bill goes to her email instead of mine. I buy stuff, and she pays the bill for me. It works well.

I don't use Quicken, so I don't understand this comment.

I thought people used Quicken to track things, but does it do bill payments too?

I've heard plenty of comments about quirks in Quicken, there is just no way I'd want to put some quirky software, or any 3rd party SW, in between me and getting my bills paid, as then any glitches are on me. I use my Credit Union's bill pay system (which has always been 100%, and I'm pretty sure they'd stand behind any issues). In some cases, I need to use the biller's system. But every bill I have is automatically paid on a trusted system.

Like others, I get email alerts of every transaction on every account, so I'm up on what's going on (except for one detail that I may start another thread on). Why this dependence on Quicken?

-ERD50

 

[audreyh1]

I only use Quicken to track things including bills. It has a scheduler which is a very useful bill pay and deposit reminder. Bill paying is done through bank/brokerage. I use Quicken to reconcile all financial statements and generate various useful reports.

 

[thod]

I use the Quicken 2006 Windows version. I have to manually enter all transactions and stock prices as there is no account linkage anymore. Sounds like that might be a feature now.

I never wanted my financial information online with a 3rd party, so I never upgraded when Quicken started requiring it. Apparently, I might have needed to be worried about accuracy in addition to privacy.

I do get a lot of satisfaction entering the data and reconciling it. It does take some time, but in the end, I know it is right.

 

[Sirka]

I'm also an avid Quicken user and like everything to be just right. Recently Chase implemented some sort of new authentication procedure that required reauthorizing my accounts (all credit card). Doing this created new quicken accounts.

I had to manually copy 15-25 years of transactions from the old accounts to the new accounts. Quicken failed this miserably and initially wanted me to click 2-3 times on each one to confirm, confirm I wanted to move a reconciled transaction, and confirm again because it was more than a year away. Eventually I figured out that I could unclear each transaction and get things moved faster. It was still a mind-numbing PITA! I had tens of thousands of transaction to deal with.

Then I found that numerous transactions were missing or duplicated and had to manually go through to search for duplicates and look at statements to identify missing transactions.

You had a hiccup. I had a full-blown proectile vomiting event on my hands. It took me literally over 3 days of work to get things sorted out and reconciled again. Ultimately there was one account I could not get to balance and did not have the old statements for so I had to put in a fake transaction ~15 years ago to get the balance right.

Now Quicken fails to recognize that I have already reauthorized Chase and transactions are downloading normally. But I am scared to death to let it reathorize again!

I have used Quicken for a long time, at least 25 years and possibly close to 30. But I definitely have a love-hate relationship. I feel like they have horribly bungled this change in Chase authorization.

I have a regular problem with Quicken screwing up Chase accounts. It usually happens after the software update. It is very painful to find which transaction got lost...it could be year or more. Anyway I keep daily backups for this so when I discover that my account doesn't balance any more, I bring 2nd laptop running Quicken with the backup file. I then compare balance month at the time going back until I find the problem. It sucks!
So I never let Quicken create new accounts, just say skip! Even if you let them to reauthorize, it may take a few tries.

 

[cathy63]

I don't use Quicken, so I don't understand this comment.

I thought people used Quicken to track things, but does it do bill payments too?...

Yes, Quicken has a billpay feature, but NW-Bound wasn't using it. His wife was using some other method of electronic payment. One payment went astray three years ago and neither of them noticed that Chase hadn't received a payment for that month.

Now that he is using Quicken to track that account again, the old problem came to light and he was able to see that he's out $43.43.

 

[ejman]

I continue to use Quicken 2010. I enter and reconcile everything manually. All my investments accounts, bank accounts and credit cards. It takes me about half an hour a week to enter all the transaction info (I don't get out much ha!) I very occasionally catch a goof up and get it fixed. (Bank charge that shouldn't be there for example). I suspect many people that update to the latest Quicken and do all electronic downloads and reconciliations perhaps glance at their accounts occasionally and say to themselves "looks about right" Who knows what's really in there? The Shadow knows.

 

[audreyh1]

I’m still limping along with Quicken 2007 for Mac. Imports directly from financial institutions stopped working 2 years ago, although it is still able to import QFX files thank goodness, so that covers most financial transactions. I have to manually enter Fidelity and Schwab transactions - once a month generally. Downloading quotes stopped working a year ago, so I learned how to generate quotes in numbers and create the needed QIF file and do that weekly - that’s very fast but involves 2 apps.

 

[ejman]

I only use Quicken to track things including bills. It has a scheduler which is a very useful bill pay and deposit reminder. Bill paying is done through bank/brokerage. I use Quicken to reconcile all financial statements and generate various useful reports.

Yup. The bill scheduler is a great feature of my version of Quicken (2010). I usually pay bills using the provider/vendor website. (Many ways to skin this cat) Quicken reports are great because all my financial history is there since I started using it in 1992 when it was a DOS program. Historical Financial comparisons and tracking are such a wonderful feature that after trying a couple of other Quicken clones and attempting to import Quicken data I realized it would probably take many months of hard effort to clean up the resulting messes, So I'm thinking I'll stick to Q 2010 for the duration. Fortunately my version of Quicken also works just fine in Linux (my primary OP system) as I wouldn't be surprised if Windows stop supporting legacy programs at some point.

 

[NW-Bound]

I don't use Quicken, so I don't understand this comment.

I thought people used Quicken to track things, but does it do bill payments too?

For years, I used MS Money, then Quicken, to track my investments as an active investor with many accounts. For example, I could look at one screen to see how many shares of AMAT I had spread out over several accounts.

I did not even use software to track expenses. My wife takes care of tracking money going out and paying bills. My job is tracking money coming in, and to generate income. This division of labor worked well.

Then, I discovered that I could use Quicken to download spending transactions to have all info in one spot. Paying bills remained my wife's job. I only looked at expenses after the fact.

About the Amazon Visa card that I neglected for 3 years, it was because I didn't always pay for Amazon purchases with this card. I often use Costco credit card because my wife likes their kickback.

Like others, I get email alerts of every transaction on every account, so I'm up on what's going on (except for one detail that I may start another thread on).

I have this alert set up on some cards but not others. I should do this on all of them.

Still, the alerts are good for spotting fraudulent charges. They don't help with accounting and balancing accounts.

I only use Quicken to track things including bills. It has a scheduler which is a very useful bill pay and deposit reminder. Bill paying is done through bank/brokerage. I use Quicken to reconcile all financial statements and generate various useful reports.

+1, except that B of A has a scheduler that my wife uses. I never use Quicken for paying bills. Our bills are paid by "pushing" from inside B of A, never by "pulling" from an external account.

 

[NW-Bound]

Yes, Quicken has a billpay feature, but NW-Bound wasn't using it. His wife was using some other method of electronic payment. One payment went astray three years ago and neither of them noticed that Chase hadn't received a payment for that month.

Now that he is using Quicken to track that account again, the old problem came to light and he was able to see that he's out $43.43.

Yes. If I had tracked that Amazon Chase Visa account, I would have noticed the missing payment.

My wife is fairly religious about verifying every transaction, but this account was opened by me and only used by me, and she trusted that I would do the monthly verification.

 

[cathy63]

Yes. If I had tracked that Amazon Chase Visa account, I would have noticed the missing payment.

My wife is fairly religious about verifying every transaction, but this account was opened by me and only used by me, and she trusted that I would do the monthly verification.

I sympathize with her. The checking account that only DH uses is in my Quicken file for a similar reason.

 

[bobandsherry]

I'm also an avid Quicken user and like everything to be just right. Recently Chase implemented some sort of new authentication procedure that required reauthorizing my accounts (all credit card). Doing this created new quicken accounts.

I had to manually copy 15-25 years of transactions from the old accounts to the new accounts. Quicken failed this miserably and initially wanted me to click 2-3 times on each one to confirm, confirm I wanted to move a reconciled transaction, and confirm again because it was more than a year away. Eventually I figured out that I could unclear each transaction and get things moved faster. It was still a mind-numbing PITA! I had tens of thousands of transaction to deal with.

Then I found that numerous transactions were missing or duplicated and had to manually go through to search for duplicates and look at statements to identify missing transactions.

You had a hiccup. I had a full-blown proectile vomiting event on my hands. It took me literally over 3 days of work to get things sorted out and reconciled again. Ultimately there was one account I could not get to balance and did not have the old statements for so I had to put in a fake transaction ~15 years ago to get the balance right.

Now Quicken fails to recognize that I have already reauthorized Chase and transactions are downloading normally. But I am scared to death to let it reathorize again!

I have used Quicken for a long time, at least 25 years and possibly close to 30. But I definitely have a love-hate relationship. I feel like they have horribly bungled this change in Chase authorization.

I have many Chase accounts. I encountered the problem you experienced with the reauthorization. However I found a way to correct this on the Quicken community forum. Turns out you would ignore the reauthorization process to add the account, instead use the "add account" in Quicken and it would then link the accounts, nothing lost and no copying transactions.

 

[audreyh1]

When DH started his own work-from-home consulting business he took over all the bill paying and financial tracking. That’s when we got started with Quicken early 90s.

When I retired 1999 I took over all the bill paying and investment management and tracking, but had DH still take care of annual taxes so he wasn’t completely out of the loop, although I handled estimated taxes since I always knew what our income was YTD.

But that was over 23 years ago, so hmmmmm - maybe long enough!! Wonder if I can get him to handle bill pay and reconciling credit cards while I handle investments?

 

[NW-Bound]

I sympathize with her. The checking account that only DH uses is in my Quicken file for a similar reason.

When I bought AA tickets to Europe for the just concluded trip, they lured me into getting a Citi card, using $400 as a bait. Just say yes, and $400 is mine, provided that I spend so much money in a few months. And I knew I would be spending beaucoup money on the month-long trip. Just use this card exclusively (hopefully, I will remember to cancel the card to avoid the $100 annual fee next year).

Anyway, they let me put the $3200 charge for the tickets on the card. And then, I failed to alert my wife to pay it at the end of the month.

It was only when I looked at expenses on Quicken that I noticed the "free" AA tickets because there was no charge. Darn! I forgot about this new card.

Lemme see. $40.17 for interest. $29 for late fee. Dang! I was late by a few days.

After chewing me up, my wife called them and got them to reverse the late fee. The interest stayed. OK. I still won by $360, and I reminded my wife of that to calm her down.

Yesterday, just went in to check the balance of this AA card. And I logged into the BoA bank account to schedule payment in full. First time in a long time (more than 3 decades, may be 4), I paid a bill and not my wife.

My wife said she still liked to see the statement to log all the expenses. I already have them on my Quicken, but my wife still likes her own spreadsheet.

It turned out that inside B of A account page, there's an "eBill" tab that would cause the credit card statement from the AA Citi account to get transmitted and displayed inside the B of A screen. How about that? No need to log into the Citi account itself. My wife did not notice and has not used this feature.

Ain't technology grand? Well, except for the times when it screws up and drops its bits into the void.

 

[audreyh1]

Yes, the ebill feature in BofA billpay is awesome, however, many financial institutions don’t support it and you can’t download transaction data into Quicken from the ones that do.

So I’ll get the statement, and BofA will automatically schedule the bill paying, but I still have to log into the credit card site to download transactions into Quicken.

 

[rk911]

i don't rely on the Quicken download ability track credit card, bank and investment transactions. i manually enter every transaction into Quicken, usually on the day it happens but no longer than a day or two afterwards. it's a bit more time consuming but, hey, I'm retired! we also get email and/or text notifications on every bank and CC transaction. besides looking at them when they arrive i compare those notifications to the data I entered into Quicken. there's just the two of us and my doesn't drive at the moment so I'm making 100% of the CC purchases which makes the detection of fraud or misuse much easier. i do rely on Quicken to update share prices on our mutual funds and ETFs. I just wish Quicken could also update current values of our municipal bonds. I update those manually once a month.

 

[SecondAttempt]

I think I would have restored my last backup and waited a week before trying again. I didn't get around to doing the Chase conversion until Quicken had reminded me a couple of times and it was working fine by then with no duplicate accounts or transactions. So if you have automated backups turned on and still have a file from before the conversion, you might want to try again.

Thanks, yes, I have backups. But things are right at this point and downloading properly. I just want the reminders to go away. But I will be patient and hopefully eventually they will.