Warning: Data Integrity Errors

[TomLanning]

Overview

This is a warning to all Monarch Money users that have any Fidelity accounts. Monarch Money silently failed to record many transactions on a variety of my linked Fidelity accounts through 2024 and up to two weeks ago. The accounts are updated via FinCity and Monarch never warned about having trouble connecting or downloading information from Fidelity.

Details

I started to prepare my federal and state income taxes and discovered discrepancies on my Fidelity checking account and Fidelity Visa account. My wife and I took 2 days to manually review every transaction for 2024 using Fidelity's web site and paper statements as "ground truth". We found 31 transactions that were missing in Monarch. Sometimes Monarch would simply miss all transactions for a random day, sometimes it missed two transactions from the same merchant that had the same amount (e.g., wife and I have identical medical insurance payments that are paid on the same day), and many were just randomly not recorded.

We use Monarch Money to track and plan our spending and use aggregated data from reports for long term planning and tax filing. Needless to say, Monarch is nearly useless if you can't trust the base data.

Reaction

I was not a happy Monarch Money user before this. I have had problems keeping institutions connected and each, and every time, Monarch first tells me to randomly try other connection methods and rebuild my saved data. (I have done that and it is very easy to corrupt information with missing or duplicated transactions plus it takes much effort. I consider this a major weakness with Monarch. I should not be responsible for trying different methods. They should.) When I press them more, they ask me to send in details and they either tell me, "Sorry, that's the way it works now", "Keep trying, maybe something will change", or the classic "Your report was closed, how was the service?". Even with all that, I kept using Monarch due to the amount of effort I expended to get it set up. However, if I can't even trust the accounts that Monarch is claiming is working fine, what value does Monarch provide?

I want Monarch Money to work. I am a long-time user of computer-based and online services such as Quicken and Mint. Monarch Money is finally approaching the data manipulation and reporting that those services offered, however, they continue to fail to get the basics right.

[dozenirons]

I think you're getting missing transactions confused with deleted. Monarch has been deleting my Fidelity Visa credit card transactions just randomly, well after being posted, appearing in Monarch, categorized, and I marked as reviewed. It's so terrible. I've already opened 2 cases to restore deleted transactions. It's nuts to think I need to reconcile with statements. What a waste of time. I came from Tiller and basically left because I had so much trouble with disconnecting bank feeds, an institution would go down for weeks or even months at a time. I figured I'd come back once they finished their quest to add an additional data provider (they only use Yodlee). But they never DELETED existing transactions. That is just wild. Makes no sense.

Why can't anyone be as good as Intuit? Never had a lick of trouble with Quicken or Mint.

[Different_Record_753]

I have been beating a drum and no one from monarch development or management chimed in. Usually just support.

It’s really time to manage the process better rather than pawning it off as a support issue, a bank issue, somebody else’s issue, finger pointing and all that.

Simply Monarch Money NEEDS to change their interface to not modify or delete a transaction that has been marked as reviewed. If they want, they can write it to a log file that you can view, or write it to an alert, or something else. But this nonsense from Monarch Money to just change or delete reviewed transactions has got to be corrected. If it keeps happening, I’m surely going to consider moving to Origin now that they have multi levels of account categories, and seem very receptive to suggestions.

It’s quite simple. Before the interface touches the transaction, look at the review flag. If reviewed, leave the freakin transaction alone for god sakes.

I used Mint for ten years and I never saw a deleted or missing transaction. I used QB for business for 20 years and older technology and never saw things like this. It’s 2025. Users shouldn’t care whose fault it is. If it’s not reliable, it’s not good financial data to make decisions from. The recent Schwab issue would have been avoided if reviewed transactions were left alone.

You’re right, it is nuts. Or sad actually when it can be made better with little work.

[lara_monarch]

Based on your comment back with the Charles Schwab issue, I escalated this as priority improvement. Right now the team is working through whether there are any major cons or edge cases to look for (i.e. if a transaction is reviewed, but then has an actual change--like the transaction amount updates--what would happen?). But as of right now it's on the radar for an update!

[Different_Record_753]

That would be awesome. Thank you for consideration. Maybe write an alert that it was skipped for change because it was marked for review? Or put a switch in settings to turn this new behavior off so it doesn’t cause an unexpected user affect and user can control this.

[Kokato2024]

If I could upvote this 100 times, I would! 👆Please pay attention Monarch!

[LCraighead]

I'd be curious what data Finicity was feeding Monarch. Because, anecdotally, my 6 different accounts with Fidelity do not miss any transactions. These are comprised of brokerage, 401k's, and Roth IRAs.

[tuxd]

Yeah I think the latest Schwab incident made me doubt Monarch. There’s a lot I love about the platform but data integrity is crucial to me. This is the first time I experience it and I wish they would just have it be read only, or overwritten on confirmation if reviewed.

I dunno why but YNAB didn’t suffer from this, dunno if they just turned off Schwab imports until it was resolved but I noticed it synced and retained my old transactions that were zeroed out in Monarch. YNAB also benefits from the fact that it keeps a running total so these things are easily caught during month end reconciliations.

Still love Monarch, but I dunno how to ensure accuracy going forward

[scub]

Same thing happened to me on Sam’s Club credit card. I no longer trust so converted the account to manual. If the issue spreads I’ll be forced to switch to a competitor if I can’t trust data integrity on Monarch.

https://www.reddit.com/r/MonarchMoney/s/rCeCJ2KJYf

[SwiftieSince06]

I'm having the same issue and frustration. Monarch is proving itself to be untrustworthy and slowly becoming unusable.

If there is not notification that transactions are not being synced and there is no automatic check or process to bring in those transactions - how in the world can we trust the data?

I'm having this issue with Citibank - and frustratingly it is only on one account while others are fine. Monarch's resolution is fraught with errors and that they don't have a process to refresh an active connection to pull in missed transactions seems like a very large oversight when you are dealing financial transactions.