[moneydance] Bank of America issues

[Richard Hendershot]

The 2.x spec is beyond what most financial institutions support; eg.
Intuit specifies that for Mac/Win coverage the interface be written to
the 1.x spec.  It's an extensible specification which, if you look
closely at the 2.x spec., barely talks about the lifecycle and recovery
for the communications.   It talks about the 1-way automation, which is
probably what Q web connect rests on, but nothing that I could find
about reciprocal (2-way) transactions, which I'd imagine Quicken Direct
Connect rests on.

Account lock would be a lifecycle issue. If Moneydance sent a *correct*
authentication too many times it could trigger this in a particular
implementation at the financial provider.  That this is not replicated
to their own website login is actually a *gift* to you, the user.  It
allows you to access your account in a controlled and risk-constrained
manner.

Your points 1 thru 4 make sense. But you need to understand that the
file format (or POST format) and the initial response codes are only the
first 10% of the problem.  There are a *lot* of things going on behind
the scenes when Quicken connects to the site, logs you in, sets a start
date, compares the new transactions, displays the ones you don't yet
have, etc.  All that communication depends on things not in this spec.

And, even if MD did exactly the same as Quicken, there would be people
who asked things that was outside of training.  So, BofA is faced with a
choice of making people angry and paying for that privilege, or
declaring up-front that only certain installations are supported.  If
BofA were *your* company and *your* resources, what would *you* do?

-rsh

On Wed, 2006-07-05 at 12:43 -0400, David Schuetz wrote:

> > If Moneydance could 'work just like Quicken' then only we MD customers
> > would have to care.  I'm sure there are patent issues with something of
> > that nature.
> 
> That's just it -- it *does* "work just like Quicken," to my understanding.  


if it did, would this conversation be happening?


> [I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong here.]  It uses OFX, the "Open Financial Exchange" protocol, which was jointly defined by Microsoft, Induit, and CheckFree in 1997.  From the OFX web page (www.ofx.net): 
> 
>     "The Open Financial Exchange specification is publicly 
>     available for implementation by any financial institution 
>     or vendor. As of May 2006 OFX is supported by over 3500 
>     banks and brokerages as well as major payroll processing 
>     companies. The latest version of OFX is 2.1.1."
> 
> So all that we need to happen is for Bank of America to recognize that:
> 
> 1) there are applications out there besides Quicken and MS-Money
> 2) some of those also utilize OFX
> 3) for those which do use OFX, "we" (BoA) need to do _XXX_ to enable a customer's account to use OFX
> 4) for non server-side OFX issues, customers need to contact the vendor for app support
> 
> That doesn't seem like a whole lot to ask, since the only real work is creating a document that tells tech support people "Hey, if people call with Moneydance problems, all we can do is make sure that the WIDGET and the GEEGAW are set to UMPTYFRATZ.  Beyond that, it's an app problem."  (and, most likely, those settings will be exactly the same as the settings for Quicken 2006).  
> 
> 
> Or am I way off base?  
> 
> If not, is there something particular that I can tell to the tech folks that'll get it working properly? (or is my "15502 - your account has been locked" error a new one that we haven't collectively tackled yet?)
> 
> david.
> (maybe I should load up quicken on the office PC long enough to get it working and see if that doesn't set some flag on BoA's side...)
> 
> 
> 
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