Personal Finance / QIF / Scottrade Rant
I signed up with Scottrade months ago. Now that I have several accounts (bank/401k/trading), I figured it was time to setup a money manager like Quicken or MS Money. I'm running a trial edition of MoneyDance because it's pure java, cheap, and has the features I need.
Anyways to set fidelity NetBenefits, my 401k provider, I had to download the qif files and import them. The file is text based that lists transactions broken into action, amount, security(text only no description), ... Unfortunately, the Buy action "NBuy" assumes that you are taking money from the account and buying shares, but since there is no money balance in my 401k, the correct action should be ShrsIn or BuyXfr. ShrsIn worked for me so I just replaced all and it's relatively accurate. The other trick is to input the ticker symbols into the securities that are created so that the yahoo stock price plug-in can update the value of the holdings. This must be done from Tools edit securities in MoneyDance.
Scottrade on the other hand is designed to fund and buy from the funds you've deposited. They have two history files, one for financial changes and one for trading changes. After importing both into my account, it was perfect except for $150. After looking through the data I guessed that a redemption fee was charged that accounted for the difference. After talking to the representatives at Scottrade a fee was applied but no transaction was logged for that fee.
I'm a realist so I figured that these types of accounting errors are going to happen so my main intent in talking to them was to alert them that not logging a transaction in that case was likely a programming mistake and to make them aware that it was important to their customers. Their response was unfortunately that redemption fees "don't work that way" and therefore will not be included in the log. Furthermore I should be aware of the fees and adjust my program manually. I told her that I thought it didn't make sense to provide a list of transactions if some are omitted. She agreed in general, but gave no indication that the issue would be given any further attention.
It's not worth the fees for me to switch brokers, but I would definitely prefer my financial institutions to accurately report the history of the account. I don't know if other brokers have similar problems or not, but in case anyone is considering scottrade, they should know about this deficiency.
In summary, I was able to get a lot of this setup because of my technical know-how. In general I think it's a shame that this isn't all worked out by now. I think the main issues are a lack of a well defined public standard and poor implementations. It's almost not worth having it setup because you have to double check the numbers against the website anyway.
Anyways to set fidelity NetBenefits, my 401k provider, I had to download the qif files and import them. The file is text based that lists transactions broken into action, amount, security(text only no description), ... Unfortunately, the Buy action "NBuy" assumes that you are taking money from the account and buying shares, but since there is no money balance in my 401k, the correct action should be ShrsIn or BuyXfr. ShrsIn worked for me so I just replaced all and it's relatively accurate. The other trick is to input the ticker symbols into the securities that are created so that the yahoo stock price plug-in can update the value of the holdings. This must be done from Tools edit securities in MoneyDance.
Scottrade on the other hand is designed to fund and buy from the funds you've deposited. They have two history files, one for financial changes and one for trading changes. After importing both into my account, it was perfect except for $150. After looking through the data I guessed that a redemption fee was charged that accounted for the difference. After talking to the representatives at Scottrade a fee was applied but no transaction was logged for that fee.
I'm a realist so I figured that these types of accounting errors are going to happen so my main intent in talking to them was to alert them that not logging a transaction in that case was likely a programming mistake and to make them aware that it was important to their customers. Their response was unfortunately that redemption fees "don't work that way" and therefore will not be included in the log. Furthermore I should be aware of the fees and adjust my program manually. I told her that I thought it didn't make sense to provide a list of transactions if some are omitted. She agreed in general, but gave no indication that the issue would be given any further attention.
It's not worth the fees for me to switch brokers, but I would definitely prefer my financial institutions to accurately report the history of the account. I don't know if other brokers have similar problems or not, but in case anyone is considering scottrade, they should know about this deficiency.
In summary, I was able to get a lot of this setup because of my technical know-how. In general I think it's a shame that this isn't all worked out by now. I think the main issues are a lack of a well defined public standard and poor implementations. It's almost not worth having it setup because you have to double check the numbers against the website anyway.
Labels: investing
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