Quicken 2007- Invest. acct password fails

I have two accounts with Smith Barney, on opposite sides of the country, under two different brokers. The original one I have no problem setting up for download, with the password that I use to get into the site directly. The second account has a different account #, user id and password to distinguish it from the first and Quicken is rejecting the password.

I'm wondering if it is getting confused because the two accounts are both listed nested under the same investment company name (SB) in the password vault, although there are distinct account numbers established. I can't think of any other reason for the password to fail since I type it the same way when I go directly into the site on the web. This is becoming a nuisance because I can't download any transactions from the second account. It didn't matter before when all the money was in a single money market account, and I was getting once a month distributions which were easy to enter, but now that I'm distributing it to different securities, I really hate having to manuall enter everything and would much prefer to download. Any suggestions for cracking the failed password problem? jo

Reply to
jo
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I probably can't answer your question, but perhaps some comments will trigger additional ideas from you or others.

Speaking generally, I don't think Quicken has any problem handling two Direct download accounts with different user-id's and passwords at a single financial institution. I have at least two fi's where I have two Direct download accounts each having its own user-id and password, and Quicken handles them with no difficulty.

Password editing rules are supplied to Intuit/Quicken by the financial institutions, and Quicken uses those rules to try to prevent invalid passwords as they are being created in Quicken ... so you won't have to try a download to discover you have incorrectly formatted your password. Perhaps Quicken's password rules for SB are out of date, or corrupted.

Have you had the first SB account setup for sometime, and are only now trying to setup the second account? Or are you trying to set them both up at the same time?

What happens if you create a New Quicken file and setup just the two SB accounts there?

[Just to insure we don't overlook the obvious: passwords are case sensitive ... and Smith Barney requires at least one upper-case and one lower-case letter in passwords. In my experience, it's easy for my fingers to forget to capitalize a letter in the middle of a "word".]
Reply to
John Pollard

Quicken's limit for the total number of characters in a password is something like 31 characters ... and that was a couple of years ago; it may be longer now. The rules for passwords are supplied by the individual financial institutions to Intuit, who in turn, makes them downloadable to Quicken: each fi has their own set of rules. If the last rule that Intuit has for Smith Barney says that the password for Smith Barney can't exceed 8 characters, then that's all Quicken will allow. A financial institution can change their password rules and fail to notify Intuit.

Naturally, it is possible for Intuit to drop the ball and not pass the info along to Quicken. And it's also possible for Quicken to have a bug picking up password rules, though it seems to get them right most of the time. And it's also possible the password rules in a specific Quicken file could get corrupted.

In any event, if it was me, I'd start - not by trying to make the passwords for the two accounts the same; I start by changing the 11 character password to an 8 character password at Smith Barney. If that allows you to setup the account in Quicken, you can start downloading from both accounts.

Then you could take the issue up with Smith Barney, to make sure they have made Intuit aware that 11 character passwords are allowed. If Smith Barney is absolutely certain they notified Intuit, and that Intuit has had enough time to make the new rules available to Quicken, you could try submitting a bug report to Intuit about the problem. Actually you could submit the bug report anyway: it can't hurt. At one time, I believe that when such complaints were made in the Quicken Forums, there was at least one Intuit employee who attempted to follow up within Intuit to see that the new rules were available to Quicken.

Once Quicken and Smith Barney are in sync about the current password rules, you can change your SB passwords to whatever they allow, then change them in Quicken to match.

Reply to
John Pollard

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