Quicken download fails, OL-221-A

Sandi57
Contributor
Contributor

Longtime Quicken user, but now my download fails. Error is OL-221-A. This has been happening for several days with both my account & my husband's account.

 

I've tried everything I could find. Including updated to Quicken 2018 (Windows 10), unconnecting & reactivating Quicken's web connections. Connect to account appears to work, but then update fails. Here's what Quicken support has to say.

 

These errors are caused by invalid information being transmitted by the financial institution's servers. Quicken Support does not have access to these servers or the information being transmitted by them and cannot resolve this issue. You can try the steps below to resolve it, but it may ultimately require action by the financial institution.

Login to Me Too
7 REPLIES 7

NoCoBill
Contributor
Contributor

I, too, have recently experienced this problem.

 

Quicken's support Web site says this regarding OL-221 errors:

 

"These errors are caused by invalid information being transmitted by the financial institution's servers. Quicken Support does not have access to these servers or the information being transmitted by them and cannot resolve this issue. You can try the steps below to resolve it, but it may ultimately require action by the financial institution."

 

I beg to differ.

 

I'm a software engineer.  I design, build and maintain eCommerce system for a large multi-national corporation.  I performed a trace of network activity that occurs from Quicken when downloading transactions from PayPal.  The following are my findings.

 

Quicken does not connect directly to financial institutions from your computer.  Rather, Quicken connects indirectly to financial institutions from your computer via various Web pages at services.quicken.com and financialdataaggregation.api.intuit.com.

 

Transactions from your financial institution are obtained by Quicken via financialdataaggregation.api.intuit.com/soap/api using a sequence of six transactions.

 

For each of the following six transactions, a status code of "ok" and a status string of "call successful" is returned.  So all six transactions complete successfully with no errors.

 

Transaction #1

  CCLogonRequest - Your Quicken user Id and password are sent.

  CCLogonResponse - Your Quicken customer Id is returned.

 

Transcation #2

  CCGetInstitutionRequest - A "presence Id" is sent.  I suspect the presence Id identifies the financial institution.
  CCGetInstitutionResponse - Lots of information about the financial institution, PayPal in this instance, is returned.

 

Transaction #3

  CCCompareAccountKeyValRequest - Your account Id and a key Id is sent to the financial institution.
  CCCompareAccountKeyValResponse - A value named "match" is returned.  In this instance, that value is the letter T, which probably means "True".
 
Transaction #4

  CCGetAccountsRequest - You account Id is sent.
  CCGetAccountsResponse - Lots of information is returned about your account.  Your account nickname, account number (which for PayPal is apparently your PayPal login), account type (checking, savings, etc.) and lots of additional data.

 

Transaction #5

  CCGetAccountTransactionsRequest - You account Id is sent along with a transaction start date.  All transaction occuring on or after the transaction start date are returned.
  CCGetAccountTransactionsResponse - A list of transactions is returned.  Each transaction contains lots of information.  An Id, transaction date, posted date, amount, description, etc.

 

Transaction #6

  CCLogoutRequest - No data is sent.
  CCLogoutResponse - No data is returned.

 

Your transaction download is now complete.

 

As I mentioned above, for all six transactions, a status code of "ok" and a status string of "call successful" is returned.  There were no errors.

I went one step further and validated all XML data sent to and returned from the server. There were no errors.

 

Whatever is going wrong here is happening in Quicken. The OL-221-A error does not appear in any of the six transaction requests or reponses.

I suspect Quicken is somehow misunderstanding something in one of the transaction responses.

 

When Quicken Support says, "These errors are caused by invalid information being transmitted by the financial institution's servers.", they appear to be mistaken.  Every transaction response indicates success.  No errors are reported.

 

When Quicken Support says, "Quicken Support does not have access to these servers or the information being transmitted by them and cannot resolve this issue.", they are mistaken.  All of the information coming from the financial institution's servers transits Quicken servers.  Thus, they do have access to all of the data.

 

When Quicken Support says, "You can try the steps below to resolve it, but it may ultimately require action by the financial institution.", they appear to be mistaken.  The financial institution appears to be returning completely valid data.  Again, no errors are reporeted in any of the transaction responses.  They all indicate success.

 

You can de-activate and re-activate online access to your PayPal account as many times as you want, but that will never fix this problem.

 

Quicken needs to investigate this problem to the extent I have and identify and fix the root cause of this problem.

 

Login to Me Too

Sandi57
Contributor
Contributor

It this is a fight between Paypal engineers & Quicken engineers, perhaps someone at Paypal would care enough to initiate a conversation. I am really stuck in the middle without power to create change.

Login to Me Too

NoCoBill
Contributor
Contributor

For me, transaction downloads from PayPal was still working on November 25, 2017, but was no longer working on December 1, 2017.  I recall seeing a Quicken update recently.  I'm going to see if I can find out when that was.  Perhaps that update broke something that is causing this problem.

 

I'm on hold with Quicken support right now.  We'll see what they have to say when I give them all the details I posted here earlier.

 

Login to Me Too

Sandi57
Contributor
Contributor

re timing. I started seeing this sometime last week (midweek?). I was running 2016. I updated to 2018 hoping that would solve problems. Happy to send logs, etc to Quicken. Message me if Quicken wants more info.  thx

Login to Me Too

NoCoBill
Contributor
Contributor

I was on the phone with Quicken support for about 20 minutes (after waiting on hold for about 20 minutes) when tech's audio started to break up.  It finally went silent.  I waited another few minutes, but he never came back.  I'll try calling again.

 

A bit more info...  Connections from Quicken to PayPal use the Express Web Connect method.  All of my other accounts use the Direct Connect method.  With the Express Web Connect method, you financial institution login credentials and financial data is store on Quicken hosted servers.  You can read all the details of this at https://www.quicken.com/support/how-quicken-connects-your-bank

 

Quicken connects overnight to you financial institution, PayPal in this instance, and downloads your financial data to Quicken hosted servers.  When you donwload transactions for PayPal from Quicken running on your computer, your Quicken connects to the Quicken hosted server to retrieve your PayPal financial data.  It does not connect to PayPal's servers to do this.

 

Login to Me Too

CJCJTBJr
New Community Member

The problem is the PayPal manual login process includes the MasterCard offer after authentication and before Quicken downloads the transaction file. This causes the Quicken server to time out because it requires a human response.  If you sign into PayPal, respond to the CC offer to defer its display, then update your account in Quicken, the update will complete in Quicken. 

I have not found an option disable the credit offer splash screens on the PP settings menus. It appears once you sign in and respond to the credit offer (continue to account summary), you may reset the "offer" screen to not display for an undetermined block of time.

PayPal, please fix this; allow Quicken users to opt out of credit offers screen (for 15 or 30 days?) so that Quicken users do not have to manually log on to reset this.  It is difficult enough to track the PayPal processes in financial software.

Thanks.

Login to Me Too

Haven't Found your Answer?

It happens. Hit the "Login to Ask the community" button to create a question for the PayPal community.