Some Discover transactions download incorrectly
I have tried downloading Discover credit card transactions and noticed that some transactions download w/ a 0.00 amount and what appears to be a fragment of the description of the transaction. In the web site display of Discover account activity I noticed that the entry for these transactions appears as two lines. The first line contains the first part of the description and the charge amount, and the second line contains only the rest of the description. Moneydance appears to be missing the first line and only downloading the second, which shows up as 0.00 in my register. This is v2010 build 751.
Support Staff 2 Posted by Ben Spencer on 13 Aug, 2010 12:49 AM
Hi Zeke
This issue was reported here a couple of months ago.
http://help.infinitekind.com/discussions/problems/1313-strange-tran...
We never identified the exact reason for these spurious transactions. It does seem that the transactions are being sent by the discover server. This particular problem only seems to be happening with discover card. As I said to the other user reporting this problem it may be that these are verification transactions that vendors are using to verify that your card is valid, perhaps when making reservations. It might be worth contacting discover customer support to ask them what they are.
Sincerely
Ben Spencer
Moneydance Support
3 Posted by zeke on 13 Aug, 2010 06:06 PM
Thanks for the response. I actually know what they are and where they are coming from - they are fragments of an actual transaction. For example, the following is a transaction that I've copied from the Discover account pages:
08/05/10 08/05/10 TGT*TARGET.COM TARGET.COM MN
HF7BHKGOZSX $ 41.52 Merchandise
On the Discover web page (in Firefox) it shows up as in the attached file.
As you can see it appears as two lines. The second line gets downloaded as a separate transaction:
HF7BHKGOZSX $ 0.00
Sometimes the first line gets downloaded, sometimes not.
I don't know if this is a flaw in the formatting coming from DIscover or in the interpretation in Moneydance, but it definitely has to do w/ transactions in which the description appears as in the attached screenshot.
Support Staff 4 Posted by Ben Spencer on 13 Aug, 2010 06:21 PM
If you select Help->Console Window before you initiate the download from discover and then start the download, the raw OFX data that Discover sends will be displayed. We will be able to determine from this if the spurious transaction is actually being sent by discover or if there is an error be caused by Moneydance.
Ben Spencer
5 Posted by zeke on 13 Aug, 2010 10:26 PM
Well, if I understand the data that comes in, it kind of looks like the incorrect transactions are coming from Discover:
For example, the spurious transaction above looks like
In this case I don't see anything at all for the part of the transaction that should be there.
Support Staff 6 Posted by Ben Spencer on 13 Aug, 2010 11:08 PM
Yes. It does look like discover is transmitting this transaction. It might be worth contacting them to ask why it is included in a direct connection download. If they respond I would be fascinated to hear what they have to say about the issue.
Sincerely
Ben Spencer
7 Posted by zeke on 15 Aug, 2010 04:52 PM
I contacted Discover thru the web site and haven't got past the scripted answer phase. My question is whether there is anything in the particular request sent to Discover by Moneydance that the Discover server might not be compatible with. For example I noticed differences in the data I get when I set up ofx download in GnuCash compared to Moneydance. With Gnucash I get the spurious transactions but I also always (so far) get the first portion of the transaction as well, which I don't always get w/ Moneydance - if I did, I could deal w/ the extraneous stuff. I also have a hard time believing that this type of thing is a general behavior of Discover downloads and not limited to certain clients - if that was the case surely they would have noticed it before now.
Support Staff 8 Posted by Ben Spencer on 17 Aug, 2010 08:18 PM
Could you take a side by side screenshot of what gnucash produces compared to Moneydance. If you could show the corresponding console window display with the screenshot that would be even better. Press the print screen key on your keyboard to take a screenshot.
Ben
9 Posted by zeke on 19 Aug, 2010 03:01 PM
I deleted a reply because it had some info on the screen shots I didn't want to show. I will put it back later.
10 Posted by zeke on 21 Aug, 2010 05:45 PM
Ben
I attached some screenshots of the moneydance console and register, and the gnucash import window. Gnucash appears to be getting both the 1st line and the 2nd spurious line for the transactions shown.
Actually after looking more closely I noticed that, more importantly, moneydance is missing transactions completely between 7/23 and 8/5. However, I'm not 100% sure this isn't somehow related to the fact this is the first time I've tried to download transactions from discover.
Support Staff 11 Posted by Angie Rauscher on 24 Aug, 2010 04:50 PM
Zeke,
When you are importing from GnuCash, are you downloading a file from Discover's website, or are you using the direct connect function of the program? If you are downloading and importing to GnuCash, would you be willing to try and import that same downloaded file into Moneydance and see if it picks up the appropriate transactions?
Thanks for helping us to diagnose this issue,
Angie Rauscher
Moneydance Support
12 Posted by zeke on 24 Aug, 2010 11:18 PM
Angie
I am importing into GnuCash using the direct connection, i.e. in the same way I am downloading into Moneydance when I see the issue. I believe I already downloaded a file and imported into Moneydance successfully. As I recall I can only get full statements. I believe I used the MSMoney option when downloading the statement file. I'll see what I can do.
13 Posted by zeke on 26 Aug, 2010 06:01 AM
Angie
The statement including the dates in the previous posts (e.g. 8/5) is not available for download to file yet, but I redownloaded the previous one and in that file I don't see any issues. For download I used the MSMoney option to get an ofx file.
FYI GNuCash apparently uses APPVER=1800 (Quicken 2010?) and I noticed Moneydance is using APPVER=1700 (Quicken 2008?).
Support Staff 14 Posted by Angie Rauscher on 28 Aug, 2010 04:30 PM
Zeke,
Thank you for this information. Do let me know what the statement is available, and thanks for letting me know about the version disparity. We keep trying to resolve the Discover card direct connect issue, but it's a sticky one to clear up. Would you be willing to try manually downloading and importing your next statement from Discover to see if the transactions come in properly in that format?
Thanks for you continued patience, I do apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you.
Angie Rauscher
Moneydance Support
15 Posted by zeke on 28 Aug, 2010 05:26 PM
Angie
I just downloaded the latest statement as a "MSMoney" ofx file and it looks like it imports flawlessly. The portion of the transaction that shows up as a spurious transaction in the direct-connect download appears as a memo in the imported entries from the downloaded file, and at first look it appears there are no missed transactions (certainly at least some of the ones are there that I know were missing in the direct-connect download. ).
zeke
Support Staff 16 Posted by Angie Rauscher on 28 Aug, 2010 06:12 PM
Zeke,
Thank for confirming that the OFX file imported correctly. !e believe it is the case that direct connections with Discover just don't work properly with Moneydance right now, and we're working on improving the interface with their server. From the data we have received (your input included) it appears that downloading and importing OFX files avoids this issue. At the moment this is the best work-around I can offer, and we will keep working on the problem. I'm sorry I don't have a more elegant solution to the problem, but please let me know if I can be of further assistance,
Angie Rauscher
Moneydance Support
17 Posted by Ric Werme on 30 May, 2011 05:13 PM
Okay, first wife gets a Discover Card ("I want miles") back in November but doesn't tell me until after Christmas presents are charged ("So you can't peek"). Finally add card to old Moneydance, do manual downloads/imports for a while, finally upgrade (2011 791, running on old SUSE 10 Linux), finally try setting up direct import, and run into the problem described above. The manual download/imports worked fine.
I'll be looking at future OFX files and whatever else that looks like I can help with. A simple workaround that could go into Moneydance is to add an option to discard credit card transactions for $0.00.
I did a little Jython hackery ages ago, so I could do that after the fact or simply decide that a pass to delete the $0.00 transactions is a lot quicker than programming time.
Let me know if there's anything I can try for you.