Community Discussion: I have to say I'm getting weary of all the download problems

One thing the OP does say "...they set your opening balance to something random" which is true, and I've mentioned that before. (Although "random" might be the wrong word)

Sometimes when you do a 'reset' as she calls it (I believe she is talking about the 'DEACTIVATE' online panel followed by the subsequent account online set up), Quicken indeed DOES strangely adjust the opening balance in the account. Subsequently, it will offer an Balance Adjustment to bring the ending balance up to sync with the online current balance. I've learned to life with that and copy all the balances (online, current, and ending) to the side to deal with this by manually adjusting things later (like changing the opening balance back to the original) and deleting the balance adjustment transaction.

Quicken has acknowledged this (at least for EWC+ accounts, but I seem to remember this happens in other types as well) and said they're working on a fix in a future release:

Yes, there is a too-long-standing Quicken bug that sometimes incorrectly alters the Quicken account opening balance transaction.

But no evidence (in the referenced post or anywhere else I know of) that implicates some out-of-the-ordinary Quicken bug-rate. Nor anything linking the problem to the switch to a subscription model of Quicken. It's just one bug and it's fairly easily overcome. I've experienced it a couple of times myself.

The generally recommended aid to repair the problem (which I use), is to put the true opening balance amount in the Memo field in the actual Opening Balance transaction.

Then when encountering a Quicken reconcile with an unexplained "Difference", one of the first places to look is at the account opening balance record.

What typically creates this false impression is when users reactivate multiple accounts at the same financial institution at the same time, and do not pay attention when Quicken presents the accounts "found" at the financial institution. Quicken occasionally "links" a "found" account to the wrong Quicken account - which would cause downloaded transactions for the correct account to go to the incorrectly linked account. But it is the user's responsibility to verify that the Quicken "Link to" account is correct ... which is trivially easy to do.]

"The generally recommended aid to repair the problem (which I use), is to put the true opening balance amount in the Memo field in the actual Opening Balance transaction. "

Good idea! I'll go do that on my accounts.

I hate this practice so much. A web site should be designed and maintained in order to please and serve human visitors - not machines! Changing the web site to improve it is a worthy endeavor. Attempting to automously extract numeric information from a web site is therefore bound to fail occasionally. I fervently hope that none of my FIs sink to this level of stupidity.

I completely agree with your dislike of this practice.

But looking at it from the financial institution's point of view, they would likely say it was the financially correct thing for them to do.

Screen-scraping is the cheapest available download method for the financial institution - $0.00.

- The least reliable is the screen scraping approach - cost free to the financial institution.

- The second way is for the financial institution to provide a "back door" method for Intuit to get the data - it's basically Web Connect (the cheapest reliable Connection Method) provided behind the scenes to the Intuit servers - the data from this approach should be as reliable as a stand alone Web Connect download. But I do not believe this approach is free to the financial institution.]

Financial institutions gain relatively little from offering downloads to Quicken. Only a small fraction of the customers of a specific financial institution are Quicken users (I believe in the vicinity of 1%).

Normally a business would charge customers extra for services like providing, what can be, quite expensive extra services. But the financial institutions have not been very successful at charging Quicken users for downloads. FI's that have tried have either lost some of their Quicken customers, or seen their customers voluntarily choose the screen-scraping download option at the same financial institution.

Hopefully the newest Connection Method (Express Web Connect+) will go a long way toward providing complete/accurate Quicken downloads at a price most financial institutions will find affordable. I believe it's cheaper than Direct Connect (the original gold standard Connection Method), but potentially just as reliable.

Unfortunately, Quicken does not provide info about which financial institutions offer EWC+ (where they do provide that info for Web Connect (WC) and Direct Connect (DC); so I can't get a handle on the number of FI's that offer EWC+. I'm just assuming (hoping) that EWC+ will be increasingly adopted by the financial institutions.

I think the biggest limiting factor for EWC+ is that it currently does not provide the ability for Quicken (users) to send bill pay instructions to the financial institution. Only Direct Connect can currently do that. Hoping this EWC+ limit gets removed.

- The least reliable is the screen scraping approach - which is cost free to the financial institution.

- The second way is for the financial institution to provide a "back door" method for Intuit to get the data - it's basically Web Connect (the cheapest reliable Connection Method) provided behind the scenes to the Intuit servers - the data from this approach should be as reliable as a stand alone Web Connect download. But I do not believe this approach is free to the financial institution.]

IIRC, EWC+ is not a Quicken (or Intuit) unique protocol. Many financial institutions offer access to accounts held at other organizations. They'd like their users to consider them their primary financial portal and showing other user accounts helps make that relationship sticky.

The use of security tokens over user web credentials is also a major security improvement. At some point FIs may take active measures to block screen scaping (i.e. like removing the invisible tags Quicken and others use to identify specific data fields.)

Hopefully this will encourage more wide spear adoption of EWC+.

I agree - I hope I didn't leave any other impression.

Direct Connect/Web Connect/Express Web Connect use the OFX (Open Financial Exchange) specs, which were developed by Intuit and Microsoft along with many financial institutions.

EWC+ uses the newer FDX (Financial Data Exchange) specs.

A lot of big name (and smaller) financial institutions have signed up for FDX - which costs money - so it appears they're serious about it.

portal ...

True. But I would caution anyone from rushing into this approach.

Too "sticky", I think.

And that also means no more need for 2FA for downloading (as typically now required for many EWC downloads).

Based on my information and experience so far, I agree.

Sadly, I'm not sure the "conversion" is moving very fast. There have been problems reported by users switching to EWC+ (though I have had very few of those problems myself), but I'm hoping the cause(s) of those problems have been found and fixed now.

I believe adding the capability to send bill pay instructions from Quicken to the financial institution using EWC+ would help convince more users to push for EWC+.