Wednesday, September 9, 2009

OL-301: The Strange Behavior of Quicken for Mac and How I Got It Fixed

I'm a PC; my girlfriend is a Mac. Being a girl, her finances are a mess. I offered to help her get set up on Quicken, and followed through by installing Quicken 2007 for Mac on her OS X 10.3.
 
THE PROBLEM:
I use Quicken 2009 on my PC for my finances. Both of us have our checking accounts and credit cards at Chase. When I tried setting up her automatic downloads from Chase I kept getting an error saying OL-301. So I began to tinker... First, I tried downloading her banking info on my PC, and it work fine without any problems. I was sure this is a Mac issue. Next, I tried downloading MY banking info onto her Mac, and that worked fine too! I was sure at this point that it must be an issue with Chase.
 
I got on the phone with Chase, and the rep (with a filipino accent, yes, it was after 11pm ET) told me to go into chase.com and click on activate quicken. I did that, and it gave me two choices: A) Manually download the transactions from the web and import to quicken, or B) Pay $9.99 a month for automatic download.
 
I immediately began to kick and scream telling them that I can download my transactions for free, so there's no reason my girlfriend shouldn't be able to do the same! After a hold period the rep came back and explained that I had initially set up my online access with my credit card which offers free downloads, but my girlfriend set up her online access with her checking account. She transferred me to Chase credit cards services to pass the buck along. By now my girlfriend went to bed and I could not get her to verify her info on the phone so I hung up.
 
HOW I FIXED IT
1) I logged onto chase.com and click on "Display/Hide accounts". I clicked on "hide" for all accounts other than credit card accounts, and clicked the "show/hide" button to save the changes.
2) I clicked on the top bar on "Customer Center" and scrolled to the bottom of the page and clicked on the link "Activate money, quicken, etc." and activated (this time it just activated without the $9.99/month).
3) I went back "Display/Hide accounts" from step 1, and put back the checking account and money market account to "show".
4) I went back to quicken and hit create account, put in the user ID and password, and it worked!!
 
LESSONS LEARNED
1) There doesn't seem to be any logical consistencies to the behavior of IT departments of online banking.
2) Customer service reps and tech support from larger companies are useless, but they do clue you in a bit about the problem which can sometimes help you go fix it yourself. (This lesson was actually learned long ago with Verizon tech support for my Blackberry...).
 

19 comments:

Unknown said...

Thank you- this tip just saved me $10 a month!

Anonymous said...

Thanks! This is ridiculous, but worked perfectly.

shellie taylor said...

thank you so much - something that finally worked!!

Anonymous said...

Thank you - this worked for my Chase credit accounts! Why couldn't Chase tell me that?

Anonymous said...

Thanks! Worked for me too. Love the workaround to save $$.

Anonymous said...

Nice post - I only have a Chase credit card and couldn't understand why Quicken wouldn't work!

Anonymous said...

Epic. Works great!

Sators said...

thanks!! worked great!

Anonymous said...

thanks! saved me a bunch of frustration

Anonymous said...

Awesome! I used to work in banking and I know that there is stuff like this all over the place. Thanks so much for finding this one!

Anonymous said...

Thanks!

Anonymous said...

This is GREAT! Thank you SOOOOOOooo much!

Anonymous said...

Thanks for taking the time to type this up! It was really helpful!

Anonymous said...

I spent a couple of months trying to fix this issue with Chase tech support - with no luck. That was 18 months ago. Your solution worked like a charm! Thanks so much.

Anonymous said...

You da man!! Worked as described!

Anonymous said...

Two and a half years later, and this is still a helpful post. Thanks!

Anonymous said...

Outstanding! Have no idea how you figured this out, but it's still works. Thanks so much...

Adam Nash said...

Amazing. You just saved me hours of typing in statements. You should get a medal for this.

The Commando-in-Chief said...

Wow. I posted that 4.5 years ago and never checked back till now. Looks like I helped at least 18 (mostly) anonymous people. Feels nice!