[GNC] Fidelity and TD Ameritrade setup

[David Reiser]

> On Nov 1, 2020, at 2:43 PM, April <faith2013hk at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi there,
> 
> I am new to Gnucash. I would like to set up online access for Fidelity and
> TD Ameritrade.
> 
> But somehow I can not get them to work. For example, I can get account list
> but can not get transactions from Fidelity .
> 
> Anyone set up successfully?
> 
> Thanks
> Ada
> 

The transactions are probably being sent, but aqbanking doesn’t handle brokerage account transactions well at all. The aqbanking author doesn’t have access to any US brokerage accounts to do testing. The net result is that a direct online banking download from Fidelity and TDAmeritrade results in almost no transactions showing up in Gnucash.

If you set up aqbanking to keep a log of the ofx download data stream, you can open the log, save the text associated with a particular download to a separate text file (transactions.ofx, for example), then use File>Import>Import QFX/OFX… in gnucash to import the transactions. With the manual import, gnucash uses the libofx library instead of aqbanking.

Neither Fidelity nor TDAmeritrade makes it easy to get an ofx file. They assume that if you’re on the website you want a CSV download. And obviously (they think) if you want ofx, then you’re using Quicken. So you end up having to either get an external ofx connection app or deal with the aqbanking log file.

Dave
--
Dave Reiser
dbreiser at icloud.com