Setting Up Direct Connect with USAA
USAA made some changes in January 2021 to restrict access to Direct Connect.
MoneyWell has been updated to work with their new connection method but it now requires a few extra steps:
This may look daunting, but the following guide has been broken down into a number of steps to make sure it is clear what you need at each step. If you're at all unsure, please contact support (link below) and we'll do our best to help if you're stuck at any stage. These instructions have been tested by everyone who tried out the MoneyWell beta to get the USAA connection working again.
Follow these steps if you have an existing USAA account already in MoneyWell which you wish to (re)connect to Direct Connect.
1) From within MoneyWell go to Transactions -> Edit Online Connections.
2) Click + to add a new connection.
3) Find USAA (new) in the list.
4) Click on the link to take you to the USAA site to register (or click here to open it in a new tab).
5) Login to USAA using your online banking credentials.
6) On the page where it asks you to "Allow Quicken to access your USAA information", you need to gather your clientID.
This is a 36 character id, made up of 5 groups of letters and numbers separated by hyphens.
If you look at the URL (address) of the page you're on, it should look like this:
The whole URL will be something like https://www.usaa.com/inet/ent_oauth_consent/authorize?0&client_id=6cda5078-c2ef-11eb-8529-0242ac130003&redirect_uri=https://df3cx-services.1fsapi.com/casm/usaa/connect&scope=usaa.profile.member.read+usaa. bank.aggregation.read&response_type=code&code_challenge=my_challenge& state=my_state&code_challenge_method=plain&session_id=nonothere-nope- nope-nope-clientidisit
You need everything after client_id= and before the &redirect_uri.
Make sure not to include the = or the & when you copy it. In the above example the clientID is 6cda5078-c2ef-11eb-8529-0242ac130003.
Make a note of this. You will need it to finish the connection within MoneyWell.
7) Accept the permission requests as below:
8) You will then see the page below:
Make a note of the Access ID and Access PIN from that page.
9) Back to MoneyWell, enter those three values into the fields:
Access ID goes into the User Name field.
Access PIN goes into the Password/PIN field.
client ID goes into the Custom ClientUID field.
10) Press continue and follow the prompts to link your USAA accounts to your existing MoneyWell accounts.
Troubleshooting
Accounts not linking
If any accounts don't correctly link, and MoneyWell creates new accounts instead, don't panic. It will be possible to correct this and maintain your MoneyWell account history. It seems that USAA have assigned some accounts a new identifier within their system, which is different from the old one. MoneyWell just needs updating so it knows about the new number. Please contact support below if you need help with this.
Duplicates on first import
As it has been a number of months since the old USAA connection stopped working, unless you've been using a beta version or haven't entered any USAA transactions, it's likely that you will have imported a number of duplicate transactions. MoneyWell can help you identify these. It's important not to just delete the newly imported ones, or they may be re-imported on your next download from USAA. You can merge two transactions by right-clicking on them both and selecting "Merge".
You can also get MoneyWell to automatically search for duplicates by going to Transactions -> Check For Duplicates.
Missed Transactions
A number of our testers of this MoneyWell update have discovered that USAA credit card transactions can behave slightly strangely. If you discover missing transactions, we believe this is because USAA are incorrectly processing the date that MoneyWell sends it when we download transactions.
We've built a workaround in to MoneyWell to try to alleviate this problem.
Double-click on an account in the source-list which exhibits this problem.
Change the "Backdated" field to a suitable value. Try 7 to start off with. If transactions are still missing, you may need to increase it.
Multiple Logins
If you manage multiple USAA accounts within a single MoneyWell document, and you use different USAA logins to access those accounts, you will need to perform the above steps for each login. MoneyWell can manage multiple USAA logins, but you will need an Access ID, Access PIN and client ID for each of the USAA logins you need to access.
Updating Login Details
If you need to update your login credentials in MoneyWell, you can do so from the Transaction -> Edit Online Connections pane.
Select your USAA account, and you can update your Access ID/User Name, Access PIN/Password or client ID/Custom ID:
Known Issues
Known IssuesDuplicate pending Transactions
USAA Credit Cards appear to be posting transactions which are pending if you download it in the window before the transaction clears. When it does clear, they are using a different ID (FITID) to refer to the transaction. This causes MoneyWell to import a duplicate transaction. Unfortunately, because this directly contradicts the OFX standard, there is no way currently for MoneyWell to know that those transactions are the same and remove them automatically. Unless USAA change their data to correctly use the same ID for both transactions, there's nothing that we can currently do about this.
A huge thanks to all of our beta testers who helped iron out this process and identify various issues which we have attempted to fix along the way.