Vanguard Transactione Retrieve Error

[Mark]

I called the person at Vanguard who contacted us a couple of weeks ago to ask for an update. He really didn't have one, other than to say they're still working on it. So, we really don't know...

[HighTwelve]

Mark:

As I have posted before, where I live in southeast PA I am surrounded by Vanguard-ians. I am within easy commuting distance of their headquarters. One of our members of Church Council is married to a VP and I am personally friendly with several individuals, both active and retired, who work there. If you can give me any names of the anonymous IT folks who are supposedly working hard on the problem, I can try to build a fire under them.

Bob

[Mark]

Hi Bob,

Thanks for the offer to help. Unfortunately, I don't know anyone directly working on this at Vanguard. I've only had contact with a single employee at Vanguard regarding this problem, and he isn't directly working on the issue. He has told me they're still working on it, and planning to fix it, but I really don't have any insight into where they're at, or if they really are going to fix this. It seems to have been going on for too long.

[frankpazulski]

Mark, I again reached out to my personal Vanguard representative yesterday and received the following response. It doesn't look positive but maybe you can find a backdoor thru.


Frank,

I received a response from our technology department and they provided me the following message:

"As Vanguard modernizes its systems and continues to increase security to protect our clients, many third party software programs that were compatible with our system will no longer be compatible. Vanguard has a list of approved 3rd party software (TurboTax & Quicken) that our website is developed to work with. It's recommended that clients use approved software that is designed to work with the security of our website. The Product Team that oversees this portion of our system have confirmed that vanguard.com should not work with these 3rd party software programs."

I have submitted feedback to management on approving the integration of fund manager to Vanguard's OFX server like we used to have, however, at this time Frank I would not expect it to be approved. I know this is not ideal for you and is very inconvenient, but I wanted to provide you an explanation directly from them on why this has dragged on for months now.

Of course, if you have any follow up questions please let me know. Vanguard is closed tomorrow for the Holiday, but I'll be in office all next week.

[Mark]

Hi frankpazulski,

Thanks for sharing that. Given the amount of time that has passed, it does seem like they are not going to allow 3rd party programs to access their OFX server anymore. This is very unfortunate. There is a less convenient, but just as functional, workaround for downloading through their website:

https://www.fundmanagersoftware.com/faq_vanguard.php

[quercus]

Hi Mark, is there any workaround for doing account reconciliation?

[Mark]

Hi quercus,

Yes, you can reconcile with the same downloaded QFX file that has transactions. With one download you can import transactions and also reconcile. See the specific instructions on how to reconcile using a file instead of retrieval at this link:

https://www.fundmanagersoftware.com/faq_vanguard.php