Strange Chase credit card conversion to EMC+

Hi Andrew,

Did you make sure the starting balance was correct? Sometimes, after a reset, it is set to zero which might not be accurate for the account. You can figure out what it should be by comparing the current balance with the actual balance and adjusting accordingly.

-- John

I just did the conversion to EMC+ from Chase that I had to do. My savings/checking/CD accounts went fine...but the credit cards (both me and my wife) were off by hundreds of dollars after the download.

I did have a slew of duplication transactions that were listed as 'NEW' even though they had already been cleared months ago in some cases. I deleted those without accepting.

Before doing the conversion, I deleted all of the Chase linkages and after the conversion, re-linked all of them as I had done with Schwab without problems last time.

Did anyone else see this issue? I just accepted the offered BALANCE ADJUSTMENT transaction since I have no inclination to try to figure this out since I am quite sure I was up to date with all my existing transactions before I commenced with this.

But something went wrong in the process.

No, I didn't, because I assumed (yeah, I know....) that is would work out ok. But that's a good idea. Since I took a backup before doing this, perhaps tomorrow I'll revert to the backup and give this another shot. I'll report back.

Well, indeed the starting balance of BOTH my wife's and my CHASE credit cards were indeed CHANGED from 0 to a large number after the conversion.

I restored a fairly recent backup prior to the conversion.

After forcing the starting balance back to 0 for both accounts and then re-converting the CHASE accounts, I then deleted again all the transactions that had been re-downloaded. Since there were some new recent transactions that had come in, there was a slight adjustment I still had to make when offered which I marked as 'Conversion to EMC+' and setting the category to the individual account.

Although I am still somewhat uneasy about this, I am confident that the accounts were in sync and balanced before of all this, so I am willing to accept these adjustments. It's not as if they are a bank account; they're a credit card account and I'm willing to take the risk and trust the downloaded balances to be correct from CHASE as they were before doing all of this.

Still wish, however, that the opening balance hadn't been changed during this conversion and "someone" was smart enough (how to figure out, not sure) that the duplicate transactions already cleared were not needed to be sent again, but whatever. This sort of conversion happens rarely.

So I think case closed.

I just completed a test conversion of my Chase Amazon credit card from Direct Connect to EWC+.

The conversion completed without a glitch (*) - my account starting balance was unchanged and my current, ending and online balances were correct.

As to the download of duplicate transactions: this conversion to a new Connection Method has the same unavoidable problem that other Connection Method conversions often experience.

The key to preventing duplicate downloaded transactions in Quicken is the "Transaction ID" (Quicken insures that if a downloaded transaction contains a Transaction ID that has EVER been downloaded before to the same account in the same Quicken file, that duplicate transaction will not be "accepted"). And for preventing duplicate transactions to work, the Transaction ID must be unique for every unique transaction, and once a transaction has been assigned a Transaction ID, it must retain that exact same Transaction ID forever.

So first of all; it is at least impractical, if not impossible, for the software employing the new Connection Method to know which specific transactions were previously downloaded to a specific user/account/Quicken-file using the old Connection Method. Second; it is impractical/impossible for the software employing the new Connection Method to know what Transaction ID's were assigned to the transactions created by the software that controlled the old Connection Method.

A user could easily get the same problem when switching from Web Connect or Direct Connect to Express Web Connect, or vice versa. Financial institution software creates the Transaction ID for Web Connect and Direct Connect; Intuit creates the Transaction ID for Express Web Connect. There is no practical way for one party's software to know the Transaction ID's assigned to transactions that were created by the another party.

EWC+ is yet another Connection Method, and it doesn't use OFX; so it's definitely subject to the same Connection Method switching problem as other Connection Methods.

Thanks John for these comments. Yeah, I know that it would be difficult, if not impossible, for the weeding out of the dups....but I can dream.

At least this doesn't happen *that* often.

Thanks John for these comments. Yeah, I know that it would be difficult, if not impossible, for the weeding out of the dups....but I can dream.

At least this doesn't happen *that* often.

Glad you had success. My actual Chase Bank accounts didn't have many insurmountable problems, it were the two (his and hers) credit cards that I could never get to balance to the online balance correctly without have a offsetting transaction to...but there might be problems within Chase itself that prevented that from happening with pending, but not accepted transaction within Chase according to what I think I read from John Pollard.

But the good news is that indeed I do have what I call a 'steady state' and my Chase account does reconcile now without being out of whack each day like it did after the conversion for a while. But I do still have that pesky offsetting transaction that I used to force the balance to be zero.

When I get my hardcopy statement from Chase, I'm going to look at it very carefully and match it up to the Q register and visa-versa to see if I can find anything suspicious.

Hi Andrew,

I forgot to mention that there was one transaction missing from the register (not downloaded) but the online balance assumed it was there. I verified this out by checking my Chase account through their app and noticed it. It was the last online transaction - my guess is that there's a window where transactions can get lost on a conversion or reset. I entered it manually and set the status to cleared. Everything now matches and downloads are stable. In the past, I had a similar problem with other accounts such as Truist when they converted from Suntrust but that was all Direct Connect. The good news is that this appears to be a one time failure to download.

-- John

JohnA wrote:

Glad you had success. My actual Chase Bank accounts didn't have many insurmountable problems, it were the two (his and hers) credit cards that I could never get to balance to the online balance correctly without have a offsetting transaction to...but there might be problems within Chase itself that prevented that from happening with pending, but not accepted transaction within Chase according to what I think I read from John Pollard.

But the good news is that indeed I do have what I call a 'steady state' and my Chase account does reconcile now without being out of whack each day like it did after the conversion for a while. But I do still have that pesky offsetting transaction that I used to force the balance to be zero.

When I get my hardcopy statement from Chase, I'm going to look at it very carefully and match it up to the Q register and visa-versa to see if I can find anything suspicious.

Yes, this sounds very plausible, and that's what I intend to do when i get the paper statement for the account in a week or so....I'll check each transaction again the Q register AND visa-versa looking for and dependencies...maybe I'll find the culprit that is keeping that one reconciliation transaction in my Q register. I'll let you know.

Ah ha!

I received the hard-copy CC statements from Chase for both me and my wife. Both of our Q accounts had a reconciliation transaction added during the EMC+ conversion process around 9/2/2022 as noted earlier in the thread.

With a careful matching of transactions, it turns out that there were 3 transactions missing in my Q register (one for my wife, two for me) from three separate vendors all dated 9/2/2022 across both statements. Adding those in and removing the reconciliation transaction now balances correctly.

I can only assume somehow those three transactions either didn't get recorded/reconciled correctly, or they were somehow deleted during the conversion. I am very anal in matching all my charges against my receipts.

So now at least I see what happened....and since this was a one time conversion, I'm not worrying about why.