Getting started - Online banking problems (Vanguard / Citadel FCU)

[David Reiser]

On 22 Aug 2007, at 8:27:54 PM, Shawn Poulson wrote:

> Hello all,
>
>
>
> I once evaluated GnuCash maybe 5 years ago and I thought it seemed  
> pretty
> nice, but I was too stuck on MS Money to want to change.  I  
> switched from
> Money to Quicken when I was finding it was getting quirky and  
> seemingly
> changing things in my register without my approval.  Quicken is now  
> becoming
> nearly as quirky and the user interface urks me.  Now that I've  
> seen it
> again, GnuCash has come a Looong way since then.  Bravo!
>
>
>
> I have GnuCash 2.2.0 setup nicely on my WinXP SP2 laptop, so now I  
> want to
> get the online banking to work but I've come across two problems:
>
>
>
> First, I was able to get my investment account with Vanguard to  
> download.
> However, all the transactions came in with deposit and withdrawal  
> fields
> swapped, so that my account balance was negative.  I manually  
> swapped them
> and it looks ok now.  Why is this?

My Vanguard IRA works correctly, but I've seen one case where it  
looked like Vanguard had 401K transactions signed backwards. I'd have  
to look at the ofx logs to be sure though.

>
> Secondly, I can't seem to get my Citadel FCU account to setup.  I  
> got the
> OFX/FID/URL, but can't find any broker id.  When I click Get  
> Accounts, I get
> prompted the usual SSL Cert acceptance and account password, then it
> finishes without gathering any accounts.  I get the below log:
>
> Resolving hostname "pcu.citadelfcu.org" .
>
> IP address is 12.20.52.194
>
> Creating HTTPS connection
>
> Connecting.
>
> Sending request.
>
> Waiting for response.
>
> Finished. You may close this window.
>
>
>
> Does this just mean they don't support Accounts List Download  
> feature?  I
> tried setting up an account manually, but when I try "Actions/ 
> Online/Get
> Balances" I am prompted for my password then I get a popup "Error  
> executing
> backend's queue.".  I can click Continue or Abort but either way it  
> seems to
> abort.  My accounts were originally with Atlantic FCU before  
> getting bought
> out by Citadel.  I tried that bank number, too, but no difference.

Sounds like you may not be getting a completed connection. If you set  
the environment variable AQOFX_LOG_COMM to 1, then aqbanking will  
keep a log of ofx sessions in /tmp/ofx.log, and you can look exactly  
what citadel is sending back to you.

Don't leave AQOFX_LOG_COMM set all the time, because your password  
will most likely be present as plain text in the log.

The quickest way to check the ofx parameters is to borrow some time  
in front of quicken, run a connection attempt with dummy account info  
(unless you really want to have real data lingering in your friend's  
copy of quicken), and then read quicken's ofxlog file.

> One more thing, since it's mentioned in the wiki, I'm pretty sure  
> ING Direct
> cannot be online banked without manually downloading the Quicken  
> file from
> their web site.  I work for them in IT and as long as I've used any  
> banking
> program, I've had to do it manually.  With OFX, there's seemingly  
> no ability
> to enforce the passmark security factor, so I don't believe they'd  
> want to
> implement OFX.
>
>
>
> Any help would be appreciated.  Thanks.
>
>
>
> Shawn Poulson
>
> spoulson at explodingcoder.com
>

--
David Reiser
dbreiser at earthlink.net