Merging Fleet Homelink and Bank of America accounts

As one that is about to go through the same merger later this month...

Why do you have 2 accounts? Shouldn't it be as simple as deactivating the old bank and activating the new one?

Since you have 2 accounts I would say that your method of exporting to a Qif file is exactly what I have done in the past. You might start a new file and start over again so that you only have one account with all of your transactions. In this case export both accounts and import them into a new one in a new Quicken file.

On Wed, 06 Jul 2005 15:55:53 GMT, "Laura" uttered like so:

What happened was that the first time I logged onto BoA's web banking and tried to download the transactions, Quicken asked me to either select an existing account for the destination of the transactions, or create a new one. The box to select an existing account was grayed out (presumably because there was no account on my computer that matched Bank of America's identifying data)--I couldn't open the drop-down list, so the only option was to create a new one.

I also tried going into the account settings window (open the account, then click the "Overview" tab, then click "Edit Account Details"). I tried changing all the numbers for my old Fleet account to the numbers for the BoA account (the routing number changed, and the account number now has more digits--more leading zeros), except that the box for "Financial Institution" was grayed out--it reads "Fleet Homelink" and I can't change it.

I'm not sure I'm understanding the sequence of what you are suggesting, but it sounds like that's effectively what I did. I let Quicken automatically set up a brand new BoA account the first time I downloaded transactions. I only downloaded the transactions that were after the date of the last transaction downloaded in my old Fleet account (I can't download the entire account history anyway because the online transactions only go back so far). Then I tried to export the old Fleet account transactions into the new BoA account in Quicken, and couldn't get it to work. That's when it just kept asking me if I was sure I wanted to download my Fleet transactions into my Fleet account. If I click "Yes," there is a progress bar showing transactions being imported, but when I view the account registers, nothing has changed, so I assume that it is importing duplicate transactions into the old Fleet account and simply overwriting them (or ignoring the duplicates). I can't get the transactions to go into the new BoA account. I tried this procedure 3 or 4 times, restoring my backup data file before each attempt, and paid close attention to be sure I was selecting the right "To" and "From" accounts, but it kept doing the same thing every time.

Never mind, I figured it out.

There was a link on BoA's website that I never noticed that gives instructions for updating Quicken accounts. For anybody else who is trying to figure this out, go to BoA's home page, and there is a button in the lower right corner of the screen that says something to the effect of "Welcome new customers: Learn more about your transition to Bank of America." The instructions aren't 100% clear (they left out a step or two that I had to think about to figure out), but it did the trick, and now I have one combined Quicken account for both my old Fleet account and my new BoA account.

If you can revert to a backup from before this happened, you should be able to redo the download into the correct account by deactivating the Fleet account for transaction download, then changing its characteristics to that of the BofA account (possibly by just changing the FI name) - and if it is a direct download account, reactivating the account for transaction download.

First try making sure you have the BofA account open in Quicken before you start the import.

If that does not help, possibly the QIF file you created has a "header" transaction for the Fleet account preceding the regular transactions. You should be able to modify the name in that transaction to match *exactly* with the BofA account name in Quicken and import successfully. (You could probably just delete the header in the QIF file for that matter).

QIF files can be easily modified in any word processor; and their format is very simple: one field (item of Quicken data) per record (line in your word processor) - and the end of a QIF transaction is noted with a single caret (^) in position one. Each item of data is identified by a single character in the first column of each record. Header transactions have an exclamation point (!) in position one, and may contain one or more data item; account header transactions contain the name of the account following the header identifier "!Account".

Glad you figured it out and thanks for the heads up to double check their website for instructions. I'll be checking those instructions before the cut over later this month.

The other different thing about this transfer is that you HAVE to sign up with BoA for the online services BEFORE you try downloading into Quicken. We did not have to do this with Fleet, IIRC. When I went to set up our new BoA account it failed to download because of this missing step. There is a 24hr waiting period for the request to take place.

On Wed, 06 Jul 2005 17:42:13 GMT, "John Pollard" uttered like so:

That's basically what I had ended up doing, after I found some instructions on BoA's website (see my other post in this thread). You don't even need to change the characteristics of the account--they all update automatically, though you may want to at least go change the name of your account in Quicken afterwards for your own purposes.

Thanks for the help, Laura and John!

I went through the same thing as a Homelink user being moved to BofA. I thought that all I would have to do was to change the financial institution on my fleet accounts, but it turns out that to enable direct download (i.e. one step update, not downloading a qfx file), I had to contact BofA. No 24 hour waiting period though - they did it for me on the phone and it works fine now.

It says there is a 24 hr waiting period, but when I went through the procedure after the MA conversion, as soon as I signed up, I could download right away.

...Ron