Duplicate Transactions When I Update

Hi, Ken.

I've had some of these, too. My impression is that there is something wrong at the bank - something minor and self-correcting. I've just deleted the duplicates and they've not reappeared.

I said "at the bank", but it might well be in the transmissions between BofA and Quicken. As you know, I'm not very familiar with networking stuff, either here in my own home office or in the "cloud" or in the financial transaction data transmission world. But this glitch seems to me like the kinds of mistakes that I make pretty often, find and fix and forget about. My guess is that some link in the chain lost track of what it had downloaded so it did it again, and that simply deleting the duplicates is all that we need to do on our end.

Maybe it's sunspots? ;^} Our TV reception was messed up for several hours last night. We don't have TV cable, just an antenna in the attic that feeds two TV sets (via digital converter boxes) and my computer's TV tuner cards. Normally we can get about 2 dozen channels (most of them worthless to us) from Austin and San Antonio. But from late afternoon until about 10 PM (CST) last night, they all reported "No Signal" over 90% of the time. (But I could get one channel clearly from Mississippi Public Broadcasting!) Today, they are mostly back to normal. Maybe all this has nothing to do with BofA/Quicken - but who knows? (We'll have to ask Hal.) ;^}

RC

-- R. C. White, CPA San Marcos, TX snipped-for-privacy@grandecom.net Microsoft Windows MVP (2002-2010) Windows Live Mail 2011 (Build 15.4.3538.0513) in Win7 Ultimate x64 SP1

I'm using Quicken 2012 Premier, R 5 (21.1.5.33). Every morning I do an update, downloading transactions from my bank (Bank of America) and several credit card accounts. This morning it found about a dozen "new" transactions from BofA. But they weren't new; they had all been downloaded a few days earlier. This morning was the second time this happened. The same thing happened once before, a week or two ago.

Anyone know what might be wrong? Something with Quicken? Something at my end? At the bank?

"R. C. White" wrote in news:f4ydnRa58PDTUdrSnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@posted.grandecom:

With my discovercard updating there have been problems like this for a while now. Discover claims they're working on it. Quicken has a place where they ask foruploads of certain log files, so Intuit is involved as well. It really sucks that in this day and age they can't keep a file on your machine going that keeps track of which transactions have already been downloaded. That's been a simple thing for emails I leave on the server for decades ... I wonder whether it may have something to do with the extra zero dollar transactions with an ID number that I get from Discover as well for every transaction ...

At the bank, I've been through this for over a year now with RBC. The first of every month Quicken downloads a duplicate of EVERY Visa card transaction for the previous month! They're "working on it" and the only suggestion was to not update on the first(!) but waiting a few days doesn't fix it, the duplicates still come....

Thanks, RC. That's my guess too, but it's only a guess, and I was asking in the hope that someone knew for sure.

Yes, I've of course done the same. It's only a minor nuisance to do it, but it requires being very careful, lest you accidentally leave in a duplicate and screw up your records.

Yes, but again, we need to be very careful that we identify the duplicates.

LOL!

Ugh! *Every* month? That's much worse than my experience.

Who's the "they" that are working on it--RBC or Intuit? If it's RBC and I were in your shoes, I'd switch to another Visa card carrier.

OK, it's no longer just a guess. I just called BofA and they confirmed that it was their problem, and they've had many calls about it today. The person I spoke to told me that they hoped to have it fixed by midnight tonight, but of course there's no guarantee.

What seems odd, though, is that your bank must be different from mine, and Han and XS11E have had the same problem with still other banks. That certainly suggests that the problem is considerably wider than just an error at some bank.

"Ken Blake" wrote

I'm using Quicken 2012 Premier, R 5 (21.1.5.33). Every morning I do an update, downloading transactions from my bank (Bank of America) and several credit card accounts. This morning it found about a dozen "new" transactions from BofA. But they weren't new; they had all been downloaded a few days earlier. This morning was the second time this happened. The same thing happened once before, a week or two ago.

Anyone know what might be wrong? Something with Quicken? Something at my end? At the bank?

-----------------------------------------------

Something with whatever company is formatting the BofA OFX data for download to Quicken. Possibly BofA; if not, their OFX service provider (assuming you are using Direct Connect, or Web Connect to download - with Express Web Connect, it is more difficult to determine the source of the problem).

I'm not sure why there are any duplicate transactions being downloaded; but normally that's not a problem. Each transaction is expected to have a unique identifier (created by the fi) and when a transaction downloads with an identifier that Quicken knows has been downloaded before, Quicken never presents that transaction to you.

In this case, BofA is assigning unique identifiers to the duplicate transactions, so Quicken has no way of knowing that they are duplicates.

I'm almost certain that Discover is having the same problem.

It's possible that BofA and Discover are both using the same OFX service provider.

"John Pollard" wrote in news:ji8tf0$17v$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

With Discover it has been going on for more than a month, and it is starting to irritate me greatly. It seems to me that it started around the time that Intuit had finalized their latest "upgrade" of the download system, around the same time that Chase finally had their problems fixed. In my NOT very humble opinion, it is all Intuit's fault for not providing the banks with a fool-proof way to code those transactions. And, John, if you know someone at Intuit, please put a pushpin on the seat in front of his computer, correct side up. It is really high time that things like this don't happen anymore. But then, you may not know the person to whom my diatribe is directed. Let's hope someone does get the HINT!!!

Hi, Ken.

"Suspicion: CONFIRMED!"

I know you are old enough to remember those classic carto>

OK, it's no longer just a guess. I just called BofA and they confirmed that it was their problem, and they've had many calls about it today. The person I spoke to told me that they hoped to have it fixed by midnight tonight, but of course there's no guarantee.

What seems odd, though, is that your bank must be different from mine, and Han and XS11E have had the same problem with still other banks. That certainly suggests that the problem is considerably wider than just an error at some bank.

Thanks. I hadn't realized that the banks didn't do this themselves, but went through a provider. In fact, I hadn't even heard of an OFX service provider before.

But assuming that BofA and Discover use the same provider, along with RBC and whatever bank RC uses, that explains why several of us using different banks are having the same problem.

Hi, Ken.

While it's not worth wasting time with, there WAS a cartoon series by that name. Each single-panel cartoon would show a situation that we had always wondered about, such as postal workers in the sorting room playing catch with packages marked "Fragile; Handle with Care!'"

But a quick Bing search didn't find much about "suspicions confirmed". One passing reference said just:

"SUSPICIONS: CONFIRMED "Many years ago *True* magazine used to have a cartoon series with the title: "'Suspicions: Confirmed.'"

And Wikipedia says, "True, also known as True, The Man's Magazine, was published by Fawcett Publications from 1937 until 1974."

One of my working-my-way-through-college jobs was in the library, where I spent way too much time in the archives reading old magazines, especially those with cartoons. ; Hi, Ken.

Time after time, over the years, I have noted lengthy threads regarding problems involving downloading transactions. That is why I adamantly refuse to do it--too many opportunities for the financial institutions, Intuit, etc. to screw up. And screw up they do, time after time after time. If you don't believe me, ask others who have been in this newsgroup for years. Invariably MORE time is spent on fixing the problems that it would to process the transactions oneself. Doing it myself, I am confident of 100% accuracy.

Have also had this with Discover in the last couple months. Less than a handfful of duplicates thankfully.

I also seem to recall one transaction in my checking account that would not download at all. I had to enter it manually.

It's RBC, they admit the problem. I have thought of switching accounts, I have several brokerage accounts and others offer credit card/checking services but RBC has become a habit, I guess.... I use that for all my normal living expenses, it's my only checking account. I'd have to get SS to switch my checks to the other account if I did change, I'm not sure human life expectancy is long enough to deal with SS?

It's not hard to delete the dups, it's only the first day of the month and they're always missing first column information (check # or ATM or Visa, etc.) that the original items have nor do they show "match" as the original items do.

Thanks for the clarification, RC.

Your choice, of course. No, it's not hard to delete the dupes, but what worries me is that if I miss deleting one, or accidentally delete the wrong entry, I screw up my balance, and that can be a serious problem. I just don't like having that extra risk.

Let me explain "screw up my balance", last year (I asked about it here at the time but didn't understand the problem and got a lot of good but unrelated advice) they dumped hundreds of transactions into Quicken and for reasons I don't even understand I must have clicked on "accept all" and it did. Next time I tried to balance I was thousands out and finally realized the only fix was going back over a year and deleting all the dups. It took me a couple of days to find and delete all of them and get the account back in balance.

As you might expect, I'm VERY careful about accepting downloaded transactions now....

One reason NOT to switch is: after reading this thread I have no reason to believe another brokerage wouldn't have the same problem.