Problems Retrieving from Fidelity

[Mark]

Hi Mike,

I believe Fund Manager supports all the same brokers as Quicken for retrieving. I know it supports all the same ones as MS Money. Any broker that offers the required Open Financial Exchange (OFX) server we will support. So, to answer your question, I don't think it would be useful to also have Quicken.

[modelerMike]

Thank you Mark.
I am still trying to wade through all the issues that will allow me to use your FM product efficiently

Good day,

Mike

[jeffweiss9]

Mark-
Finally, I think I've got all my accounts setup and linking to FM except for one last account: TIAA-CREF (fixed and variable annuities, not mutual funds). They have Quicken instructions on their web site and I was able to follow them enough so that from there, they actually opened up and setup the major TIAA-CREF account in FM. But I can't retrieve transactions or reconcile that account since it was set up. Nor did it set up the other 3 TIAA-CREF accounts that I have from former employers.
Any suggestions on how to handle TIAA-CREF?
(Other than this I think I'm very close now).
THanks,
Jeff

[Mark]

Hi Jeff,

What instructions did you follow? How were you able to set up your 1 TIAA-CREF account? Did you retrieve it, or download/import, or specifically how did you set it up? What happens when you retrieve it now? Do you get some error message, or what is specifically wrong?

[jeffweiss9]

Mark-
I'm afraid I did this 2 weeks ago and don't remember exactly what I did. I did talk to their help person while I was doing it because I believe I had to get another username and password just for this. What I remember (I have a printout of their instructions for Quicken) is that I logged onto my TIAA-CREF account on the web and went to the page they have "Downloading Account Information with Quicken for a PC". It says create a Quicken account in Quicken for each TIAA-CREF account but I ignored that and just checked TIAA-CREF and ONLINE "Let Quicken set up my accounts". It asks for other information (name of this account, employer name but I don't remember what I put in because it wasn't what got set up. Somehow the TIAA-CREF website some how created the FM account with a name of TIAA-CREF plus the account number, using this other username and password. It had all my assets in that TIAA-CREF account (I have 3 others and nothing was done with those). I've cross checked all the investments against printed statements and they were correct.
However FM cannot retrieve transactions, reconcile the account, U get a "Signon Invalid" error box saying "You have entered an invalid TIAA-CREF Brokerage Services ID. Please reenter your current ID or contact your advisor. It is probably asking for my web logon ID and Password but I'm hesitent to try that because the password that it set up is ******** no longer recognisable.
At least this is an existence proof that TIAA-CREF can do something with FM. Any chance you can get it to do what TIAA-CREF actually wants?
Thanks very much.
-Jeff

[Mark]

Hi Jeff,

It sounds like the problem is that you have the wrong username/password. There is nothing special FM would need to do for TIAA-CREF. It is simply connecting to their OFX server to get your data. All OFX servers work the same, it is a standard. Since you are getting the signon invalid error, you do not have the correct username/password entered into Fund Manager under the investment properties "Transaction Retrieve Settings...". I'd suggest re-entering the details as you think they are supposed to be. If you can't get past the signon invalid error, you'll have to call TIAA-CREF and ask them for help getting your correct username/password.

[jeffweiss9]

Mark-
Ok, now I've had a disaster and have no idea why. I started up FM tonight but got messages that 11 different investments "specified in portfolio could not be found". Sure enough when I looked in the FM directory, those files were gone and when I looked in FM itself at those accounts, the investments were missing for all of them except, I believe, 2 which I can still see in the proper account. What the hey happened here? I did a search on one of these files and it definitely is not on my machine but I didn't intentionally move it or delete it. I just lost a whole bunch of my work in setting this up!!
My machine did reset itself during this time once overnight. Did I just have a disk crash that only affected FM files or any idea what could have happened or what I can do to restore things I have a backfile from a week ago but I'm afraid to restore it.
-Jeff

[Mark]

Hi Jeff,

Sorry to hear about the troubles. I do not know why your investment files are not on your hard drive. Hopefully you have the "autoback" feature turned on? Go into FM under "Options / General Preferences... / Data" and see what you have set for the autobackup settings. You will see the frequency and location for autobackups. Go look in this folder, and see when the last autobackup was created. You can tell by the date modified of the files. Hopefully you have a recent one. If you do, just select "File / Restore..." from within Fund Manager. Browse to that backup file, and select it. You will have the option to restore just certain files, or everything. You probably just want to restore only the missing investment files. Select those in the list, and choose to restore only selected items.

If your backup from a week ago is more recent than any autobackup, then you could use that instead.

[jeffweiss9]

Mark-
I had backup every 3 days checked but the last backup I found (aside from the one it did yesterday 2/8 of the BAD portfolio with the files lost) was from 1/19/10. I don't know why there weren't more backups available because of been on the program many times between 1/19 and 2/8. (I also did a chkdsk/f on my disk and it could find no file fragments).
I tried restoring from that last 1/19/10 backup but I had done so much work in setting up my accounts since that time that I'm much better off trying to just setup AGAIN the 11 missing investments. So I went back to the damaged current portfolio.
This is quite a setback and I don't know what happened but I can now see that the missing investments came exclusively from the last 5 subportfolios that I had set up with the exception of one account (TIAA-CREF) that I had last setup and which still has all its investments.
Pretty wierd and has me really shaking my head. I'll have to work up some courage to keep going with this.
-Jeff

[Mark]

Hi Jeff,

That is unfortunate... You might want to increase the frequency and amount of autobackups. Have it make an autobackup on every exit, and keep 60 of them.

[jeffweiss9]

Mark-
Ok, I tried to recover by using the New Portfolio Wizard to create new directories for the three that had lost all their files and that appears to have been mostly successful.
1) TIAA-CREF: TIAA-CREF told me they don't allow Quicken to download information. For them, you have to log onto their site and then download information from there. I had managed from their site to setup one FM account for one of the three TIAA-CREF accounts (which survived the disastor) but, because of that oddity, it can't retrieve transactions from TIAA-CREF. Am I out of luck or do you know a way to handle TIAA-CREF?
2) Cash Account: How can I designate one investment in an existing portfolio to be the core cash account. I think I didn't do that on one account and it keeps putting things into a Cash account instead of a core money market account and the sums don't even match. Is there any way to straighten that out?
I think those are the only remaining problems although I have to see if things remain stable and I don't loose anymore files. I did set backup for every session with 60 backups, as well as save investments every 15min.
-Jeff

[Mark]

Hi Jeff,

1) Is your TIAA-CREF account with their "Brokerage Services"? Were you able to retrieve from them before? TIAA-CREF Brokerage Services does have an OFX server, so if you have an account there, you should be able to retrieve it. If your account is not there for some reason, you can still download/import.

2) Right mouse click on the sub-portfolio in question, and choose "Properties...". You can select the default cash account there.

Did you double check that all your backups are being created okay? Use Windows Explorer and browse to the autoback folder, and make sure you see the files, and they have recent timestamps.

[jeffweiss9]

Mark-
1) no, the TIAA-CREF accounts are retirement annuities. I can download QIF files for Quicken from there and I notice FM Imports prices and transactions so I presumably can try that route. Same thing I presume with Bank of America for CD and bank account? Is that my best bet for these two at this point.? I see a "Banc of America Investments" in your list of brokerages but don't know if that is what I need to access my BofA account. Is it?
2) I had already set that in properties for the subportfolio but forgot. That leads to the question why I still got some duplicate investments even though I have the line checked about not entering duplicate investments.
THanks,
Jeff

[Mark]

Hi Jeff,

1) It sounds like your accounts aren't on the part of those firms with OFX servers, so the next best thing is to download/import. One common tip is to check with your broker/bank and ask them for instructions on getting data into MS Money (or Quicken), and whatever instructions they provide would be similar for Fund Manager.

2) Do you mean duplicate transactions (not investments)? As long as you leave that option checked to not import transactions already in Fund Manager you shouldn't see any duplicate transactions. If this is something you can reproduce, please let me know. Are you looking in the Data Register under the "Investments (all)" data type where you see duplicate transactions within a given investment? Is this a cash investment, or something else? Do you see duplicates in all your investments?

[jeffweiss9]

Hi, Mark

1) Thanks. For TIAA-CREF, their instructions for Quicken is to log on to the TIAA-CREF Site with accounts already set up in Quicken and their site downloads the information to Quicken. That hasn't worked with FM, so it obviously doesn't know the right sequence of things its being asked.

2) Yes I meant duplicate transactions, not investments. I'm not sure under what conditions it is happening, just that I see it happening occasionally and have to manually prune the duplicates to get an account to reconcile. Another thing that happens that may, or not be related, is that I get a message
"Modifying Reconciled Data Warning. You are modifying investment data for a date that has already been reconciled. Do you want to modify anyway?" ALLOW MODIFICATION DISALLOW MODIFICATION.
What am I supposed to answer to that and does that have anything to do with the duplicates? Or does it just mean that I reconciled a second time over the same transaction period, in which case, what's the right answer?

3) (NEW) I need instructions for Bank of America to link to my CD and money market accounts. They said they set up my account at their end for Quicken access, but if I chose "Banc (sic) of America Investments in the Portfolio wizard, it gets a sign in error. Do you support Bank of America (bank accounts) or do I have to download & import Quicken files for them also?

Thanks.
Jeff