Fidelity investment transactions in a checking type account show incorrectly (edited)

bob303727 · February 12

With the recent upgrade to version 6.6.0 (63814/e6f49d562d), transaction data for Fidelity Cash Management accounts (synced via Mastercard Data Connect [a/k/a Finicity]) is now misaligned in the main transaction table. Specifically:

Some rows display the Payee in the Category column.
Other rows display a pricing statement (e.g., "12.34 SPAXX shares @ 1 .0000") in the Category column.
Clicking “Edit Transaction” shows all fields correctly, indicating that the underlying data is correct, but the table display is corrupted.

Real-life example, with erroneous cells in bold:

Date	Payee	Category	Amount
[date for row 1]	(blank)	[payee for row 1]	[amount for row 1]
[date for row 2]	"SPAXX"	"12.34 SPAXX shares @ 1.0000"	[amount for row 2]
[date for row 3]	(blank)	[payee for row 3]	[amount for row 3]
[date for row 4]	[payee for row 4]	[category for row 4]	[amount for row 4]
[date for row 5]	[payee for row 5]	[category for row 5]	[amount for row 5]
[date for row 6]	(blank)	[payee for row 6]	[amount for row 6]

Suspected cause:

It appears that, in preparing the data for display, a delimiter present in the incoming data stream from Mastercard/Fidelity is not properly escaped or parsed. This may be causing column misalignment in the transaction table.
Notably, the underlying data appears to be intact, as editing any transaction brings up the appropriate data in the appropriate fields. It is only the display of the table (and the formatting of exported CSV data) that are broken.

Impact:

The transaction table becomes unreadable for Fidelity Cash Management accounts.
Based on the suspected cause, this may also represent a security vulnerability, as specially crafted input data could be misinterpreted by the parser, which in other contexts might allow injection of executable code.

bob303727 · February 12

Upon further inspection and troubleshooting, it appears that some non-securities transactions are misclassified by Simplifi as securities. In these cases, the Payee field displays as blank because Simplifi expects a stock symbol rather than a standard payee name.

So, it doesn't appear to be a delimiter issue after all — but rather, a misclassification-of-transaction issue.

The likely bug, and likely fix, seems to be in the step that classifies transactions from Finicity input as securities versus non-securities.

Report created with screenshot: reference id 525234829727046913

Quicken Simplifi Version: 6.6.0 (63814/e6f49d562d)

SRC54 · February 12

Wow Bob. Interesting post. I assume you are a programmer, so will be interesting to have your perspective in the community.

I use the regular Fidelity Inv and Retirement link so haven't any experience with this. But I will follow this as I might try your connection some time. I gave up and put my Fidelity Cash account in Investments. Mostly because I ended up not using it much.

I am hoping that soon Simplifi will change the Transaction LIst so we can use splits and recurring transactions. We'll see.

Thanks.

Coach Natalie · February 12

@bob303727, thanks for letting us know about this issue!

This may be tied to a known issue with the new Transaction List for investment accounts that have been converted to a banking account type, such as a checking account, in Quicken Simplifi. To confirm, is the account in question classified as a banking type of account in Quicken Simplifi?

If so, is that something you did before the ability to do so was removed? Or did you accomplish this after resetting the bank connection, as some users have reported here in the Community? Understanding the account status and how you arrived there will help us determine the next steps.

We look forward to hearing back from you!

bob303727 · February 12

I never did any sort of conversion. Adding the account using Mastercard aggregator you to select checking account as the account type. In fact, I was able to re-add the account de novo as a checking account while troubleshooting this.

Coach Natalie · February 12

@bob303727, thank you for that information!

It's good to know that the Finicity bank option for Fidelity allows investment accounts to be added as banking account types, and I have shared this scenario with our product team. They will add you to the ticket being worked on to resolve this for users in this state with their investment accounts. In the meantime, I don't think we have a workaround other than classifying the account as an investment account, which is the intended type for those accounts.

Otherwise, be on the lookout for a fix in a future release!

bob303727 · February 12

Thanks, @Coach Natalie. Thank you for passing this along to the product team.

I would echo @SRC54’s feedback that it doesn’t make sense for Cash Management Accounts to be classified in Simplifi as investment accounts. In real-world use, these function 100% like checking accounts — deposits, bill pay, and day-to-day cash flow. For such accounts, Simplifi's investment tools (holdings, performance, etc.) don’t add any value to the end-user, and in fact get in the way of using the forecasting and budgeting features that are actually relevant to these accounts.

It's a bit like saying a tomato is a berry — it's technically true from a botanical standpoint, but try serving tomatoes with whipped cream. 😉

AaronJB · February 14

Hi everyone… It's been a couple of months since we had to discuss this.

It worked fine up until Feb 6th for me (CMA at Fidelity connected with Fidelity Inv & Retirement) I'm starting to think that the sweep account mutual fund, SPAXX got "re-classified" as an Investment and not cash. Quicken classic gives you a choice on how it should be treated; Cash or Investment.

Not sure, What are your thoughts?

SRC54 · February 14

@AaronJB When I had my CMA as a bank account, I had to clean up the SPAXX monthly entry so there was only one of them as an ordinary dividend. The balance would be off for 4 hours.

AaronJB · February 14

@SRC54 Ya, this changed recently. Every transaction has an offsetting Purchase or Redemption in SPAXX. Not a big deal to go and delete them... It was nice while we didn't have to.

SRC54 · February 14

Yeppers. Even in Quicken Classic, I have to delete some Fidelity stuff all the time to keep in balance.

In Simplifi, I do the same even with the Investment accounts to keep the account total right (even though Simplifi ignores transactions in investment accounts).

Fidelity doesn't really care about our transaction downloads. I hope Simplifi will soon give us more tools to use to make these accounts work for us in their app.

Fidelity investment transactions in a checking type account show incorrectly (edited)

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