How to: Add your Interactive Brokers account(s) to your Mint.com account
How to: Add your Interactive Brokers account(s) to your Mint.com account
After several months of waiting for Mint.com to support Interactive Brokers finally they have that option available to their users! Unfortunately, it does come with additional work users are not used to. Usually just typing in your username and password is all you need to download your financial information into Mint. Well, it’s not quite that simple with Interactive Brokers. I’ve been trying desperately to find instructions from Mint.com or Interactive Brokers on how to successfully connect my account to Mint.com but I gave up. I decided I would figure it out myself and later on adjust my settings if an official guide becomes available. Thus far I have been able to sync with no problems and identified some common pitfalls so I hope this helps everyone!
Updated Instructions (January 2020):
Since originally posting this article Mint.com and IB have been working close together to facilitate the interface as well as fixing the issues brought to their attention. Below are the new updated instructions that facilitate adding your Interactive Brokers account to Mint.com. These changes reflect the updated Account Management and new location to find the Query ID and Token ID:
- Log in to your Account via Account Management
- Go to Settings > Account Settings (https://www.interactivebrokers.co.uk/AccountManagement/AmAuthentication?action=Reports)
- On the bottom right on a panel you’ll find a section titled “Reporting” that looks like this somewhat:
Reporting
Flex Web Service : Enabled
Third-party Services : Enabled (1 of 5)
- Make sure Flex Web Services are enabled and then click on the gear next to “Third-party Services” where you’ll find 5 third party services. One of them is Mint
- If you’ve done this before you just need to reactivate your token (as they expire every year) otherwise, enable it by clicking the checkbox and saving which will in return provide you with a Token and Query ID.
- Provide the supplied Token and Query ID to mint and you’re set!
- Remember: Tokens expire every year thereabouts (it will show below the Token the expiration date). Be sure you set up a reminder to reactivate your token soon after that date so you don’t miss updates to your mint.com account.
Updated Instructions:
Since originally posting this article Mint.com and IB have been working close together to facilitate the interface as well as fixing the issues brought to their attention. Below are the new updated instructions that facilitate adding your Interactive Brokers account to Mint.com:
- On https://gdcdyn.interactivebrokers.com go to Reports -> Delivery Settings -> Mint.Service
- Click on Activate. This will generate the token ID and Query ID for your Mint Service connection. Copy paste this into Notepad or similar word editing program so you can copy paste this into Mint.com later on.
- You should double check how long is your token ID good for. Now navigate to: Reports -> Delivery Settings -> Flex Web Service. You will see you have a token ID which you will need to provide Mint.com. Word of caution: The Token ID has a predefined period of time through which is valid. The default token lasts only 6 hours! I would recommend generating a new token with a validity period of 1 year. Once the year is over you are going to have to update this information on Mint.com most likely. If your token is already good for a long period then go ahead and leave this setting alone. If you generate a new token make a note as it replaces the one you obtained on Step 2.
- Navigate to Mint.com and add a new account as you would generally do. Your accounts -> Financial -> Add account.
- One you find Interactive Brokers on the list, provide the information required on the screen:
- TOKEN (for your Interactive Brokers account): Provide the Token ID from step 2 or 3.
- : Provide the Query ID from step J which is a number.
- One you find Interactive Brokers on the list, provide the information required on the screen:
Old / Manual / Long Instructions:
Step-by-step instructions on how to connect Mint.com with IB. The new instructions save you the hassle of creating your own Flex Query for Mint.com but if you feel like you want to tweak what information is sent over you can follow these instructions:
- On https://gdcdyn.interactivebrokers.com go to Reports -> Activity -> Flex Queries
- Create a new Flex Query for Mint.com. This is one of the more complex parts as no one knows really what you need in your Flex Query. I have identified a subset of data that seems to do the trick, but I recommend you simply add everything to the query. Extra information does not hurt Mint.com, too little information will cause you to get discrepancies though.
- Query Name: Whatever you want… say Mint.com?
- Output format: XML
- Accounts: The accounts you wish to sync with Mint.com… I recommend All
- Closed Accounts: Do not select Include closed accounts unless you have an account that you closed but you want to see the data on Mint… I wouldn´t recommend.
- Account Alias: Do not select Display Account Alias in Place of Account ID as if you change your Alias mint might think it is a new account… better play it safe.
- Include Canceled Trades: No
- Include Currency Rates: Yes
-
Date Configuration
Period: Select OneLast Business DayLast MonthLast 30 Calendar DaysLast 365 Calendar DaysMonth to DateYear to Date This last one is VERY IMPORTANT. Mint by default syncs from 90-30 days depending on their mood I guess. Adding more than 90 days therefore is worthless. More importantly, Mint.com has limits on how long it is willing to process your FlexQuery results. Say you select your last 365 calendar days: Mint.com is going to work on the request but then output an error saying there is a temporary issue connecting. The issue here is Mint tried to process that huge XML and decided it was too long for it to bother with it. Many people if they are not careful with this setting will not be able to do the initial sync as Mint.com is only willing to spend so much time trying to generate your account initially. If 30 days still causes issues, keep decreasing the timeframe. One thing to keep in mind though: Say you don´t sync your Mint.com in more than 30 days… you might lose days worth of data. After your initial sync you can increase your Period to include up to 90 days (Mint won´t sync further out than 90 days) so that you keep your data.
- Add all the information for all the sections found below on the “Activity Flex Query” page, this includes:
- Account Information,
- NAV in Base,
- Mark to market performance summary in base,
- Realized and unrealized performance summary in base,
- Month & mear to date performance summary in base,
- Cash report,
- Statement of funds,
- Change in position value summary,
- Open positions,
- Net stock position summary, trades,
- Option exercises,
- Assignments and expirations,
- Incoming/outgoing trade transfers,
- Unbooked trades,
- Unsettled transfers,
- Unbundled commission details,
- Prior period positions,
- Corporate actions,
- Transfers (ACAT, internal),
- Cash transactions,
- CFD changes,
- IBG notes,
- Interest accruals,
- Securities borrowed / lent,
- Securities borrowed / lent activity,
- Securities Borrowed / Lent fee details,
- Change in dividend accruals,
- Open dividend accruals,
- Security information, etc.
- If for some reason you want to select a smaller subset which I generally don’t recommend this worked for me but I didn’t test it exhaustively. I think it is better to have extra information and let Mint discard it than to miss something important:
- Account Information
- Cash Report
- Settlement Funds
- Trades
- Option Exercises, Assignments & Expirations
- Incoming / Outgoing Trade Transfers
- Corporate Actions
- Transfers (ACAT, Internal)
- Cash Transactions
- Interest Accruals
- Security Information
- Save your query and note the Query ID which is generally 5 digits long (probably 6 after all those Minters create a bunch of Queries, lol)
- Now navigate to: Reports -> Delivery Settings -> Flex Web Service. You will see you have a token ID which you will need to provide Mint.com. Word of caution: The Token ID has a predefined period of time through which is valid. The default token lasts only 6 hours! I would recommend generating a new token with a validity period of 1 year. Once the year is over you are going to have to update this information on Mint.com most likely. Hopefully once Mint.com releases instructions you can also restrict which IP address has access to that token. Take note of your new token ID as you´ll need it on Mint.com
- Navigate to Mint.com and add a new account as you would generally do. Your accounts -> Financial -> Add account.
- One you find Interactive Brokers on the list, provide the information required on the screen:
- TOKEN (for your Interactive Brokers account): Provide the Token ID from step K
- : Provide the Query ID from step J which is a number.
- One you find Interactive Brokers on the list, provide the information required on the screen:
Remember:
- If you get an error on the screen (like, temporary connectivity issue) it is because you have too much data coming in into Mint.com and the system can´t process it. After the initial sync Mint.com will ignore all data in the past and will only look for new data on the query.
- If your trades, account value, etc does not look correct DELETE the account and add it again following this instructions. You should add all available information in the query for that information to display properly.
Known issues:
- Temporary connectivity issues appear sporadically.
- When adding the account for the first time you can get connectivity issues if you select a very long date range for your flex report.
- The transaction log shows trades but does not show the Symbol for the security, therefore the positions are not reflected correctly.
Updates from Mint.com:
Received an update from the issue submitted when it didn’t allow me to add more than 30 calendar days… However my account still shows a $0 balance.
| Mint: Interactive Brokers Error 112 [Incident: 130126-000794] |
| Mint.com Customer Service <support@quickenonline.com> | Fri, Feb 15, 2013 at 5:04 PM | |||||||||||||||||||
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Reply-To: “Mint.com Customer Service” <support@quickenonline.com>
To:
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After submitting the requested information showing the bugs:
| Response (Shelane D.) | 02/13/2013 07:10 AM |
| Dear Juan Carlos,We appreciate the information that you have provided. In order to provide the most accurate response, I need to seek advice from my team lead. I’ll get back to you as quickly as I can.I appreciate your patience in the meantime.
Best, |
|
Dear Carlos,
Thank you for contacting Mint.com.
In order to assist you further, I am going to have to ask an engineer to look into the issue. Because this work will be prioritized against other issues, I can’t confirm when we’ll have a fix, but I will keep you posted as I get updates.
Thanks for your continued patience as we work to resolve this issue, we apologize for the inconvenience.
Best,
Shelane D.
Mint.com
I did this and even used only “last business day” for date configuration and it still didn’t pull in any data.
Did you get any error messages or did you complete the process in Mint.com but your transactions were not showing up / No account value?
I would generate the flex report on Interactive Brokers to see if any information is showing on the XML. I recommend you try the last 7 days option too and if you get an error when creating the account try again at a later time. If the information is there in the XML and you don’t get any errors I would contact Mint.com to see what’s wrong. I’m not sure how many trades you have in a day, I suppose if you are an active day trader it could be too much for Mint.com to create all that in their system. If that is the case you might want to consider not having trade data in your Mint.com account and try to see if that helps.
Let me know if any of the above ideas work for you. Good luck!
Transactions show up without balance or position information. I don’t make that many trades.
Yeah, that seems to be an issue right now. I get my transactions on the log but for some reason it is not reading the symbol information. I already submitted an email asking them to take a look but haven’t heard back. I’ll post in the forums so hopefully they can address this soon. Meanwhile at least the account value is correctly reflected on Mint.com and all the transactions appear with the caveat of the missing symbol. I’ll let you know if I hear anything from them.
I don’t even have account value.
Nevermind. Seems like they fixed it.
Great! Don’t forget to set your data range to something like “Last 30 calendar days”, otherwise you might lose information if you don’t sync often (but at least once every 30 days).
I followed the instructions and mint.com seems to connect to the query/account, but it just shows a $0 balance. Any ideas?
Does it show any transactions on your log or the entire account is just a big blank?
It’s the same issue as Ryan below. I checked the XML file, and the balances are correct. I only have one account in the XML. I checked on my phone, and it does show a transaction/deposit I made into that account, but the balance just says $0.
RF suggests there is a delay, so I would go with that for now. My understanding is that mint calculates the balance based on your initial (or final) balance for the period and then the activity. If you are providing Mint with all the information available on the report they should be able to properly populate your account with the correct balance. Try opening the account list to see there aren’t any issues with the account and force a refresh of your IB account. If after a few days you still have a $0 balance I would submit a bug report to Mint.
Also, I´m not sure if you have tried to add the account again. If you haven’t I would wait until a few days have passed in case there is a delay in the system and then do that. (I think) you can always add another IB account without deleting the previous one. Hopefully it is just a temporary issue that fixes itself after a few days. Good luck!
Did you select all the information available for the XML when configuring the Flex Query (The 30+ sections they have)?
MY account populates in mint, but shows $0. I ran the report to check the XML and the correct balance is shown. How did you get it to show the correct balance and not $0.
Just as the site instructs… My next guest would be if you have more than one account on the query (paper trading, UK/US account, etc.) it could be picking an account in which you have a $0 balance. Try making the query for just one account, delete your account from Mint and add it again.
Also, when I was playing with the settings, I did randomly encounter that when adding my account the whole thing would show a balance of $0 but after removing it and adding it again it imported it correctly. It could very well be that you just need to add it again… I thought it was me goofing around but seeing there are other people getting a $0 balance it could be a bug.
I think there’s a delay. If you just wait a day or two, I think it will fix itself. At least it did for me.
I tried this following the instructions exactly…keep getting “temporary connectivity issue”. also tried changing time period, data included, all accounts to selecting a single account.
Regarding the account…its an account with minimal activity so data size should not be an issue.
I agree the data size should not be an issue in your case. I would keep it on 30 days and leave the account on “temporary connectivity issues” for few days, hopefully their servers will retry again and complete the initial sync. Meanwhile submit a bug report to Mint.com so they can see other people are facing this issue and address it. My guess is that they have started toying with the interface and that is causing a lot of people adding their accounts right now to face delays or new issues while others were able to sync with minor issues before. My account that I added like a week ago also reports temporary connectivity issues randomly but when I hit retry it syncs and gets out of the temporary error state. We just need to be patient and keep bugging Mint.com for them to address their problems. I still have the issue the share reporting is not working correctly as it doesn’t add the security symbol, but I really don’t care about having that visibility in Mint.
Tonight I followed the instructions above, with one major difference, I just selected EVERYTHING for the Flex Query, every single main topic and every single option in that query. When it tried just using the categories you listed above, I downloaded $0 balance. When I cleared that query and just selected everything, it worked great.
Don’t have enough time using this to say if I’m getting connectivity problems, but so far so good.
That’s great to hear! Now that I read the article again that is what I meant when I wrote “If you don´t want to take risks, add all the information for all the sections below”, but I guess that might be considered the sections below in the article, not below on the screen. I´ll reword it so people don’t do that. Thanks for the feedback!
Just so you know – today I noticed that all my Interactive Brokers accounts names were changed from “Interactive Brokers” to “Testing IB”. Could it be that Mint isn’t ready for this to be prime time yet?
Yeah same here. Most likely they are going back and doing testing with all the new accounts that are coming in. If I had to guess they probably just got a sample from IB and tested against that but obviously they missed a few things. I already sent them screenshots and the information they asked for to address the ones I know of so it’s good to know they are working on fixing it. Hopefully they’ll fix it soon, they’ve got most of it working already. Below is their latest email:
Dear Carlos,
You are most welcome.
Yes, we have seen the screenshot. I have forwarded your issue to my team lead to identify the root cause and work toward resolution. We’ll keep you posted on any updates we receive.
Thanks for your continued patience as we work to resolve this issue, we apologize for the inconvenience.
Best,
Shelane D.
Mint.com
My balance finally appeared in Mint.com for about 3 or 4 days, and now it is reading $0 again…
I noticed the name of the account also changed to something like…”Testing IB”
🙁
Mine still shows the right balance… just checked it right now. Oh wait, just updated my accounts and now it’s $0! Probably they are having a great time trying to get this sorted out… On the bright side they finally added IB, better buggy than never. At least we know their team is working on it unlike when they kept talking about adding it ‘someday’ and we were in the dark.
The instructions worked! Thanks for posting.
That’s great! I am still communicating with them as I am experiencing issues but I’m glad to hear at least it works for some people, that is a good sign. Thanks for commenting!
This is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks for taking the time to post. Very helpful.
I´m glad it helped!
Just noticed they changed the name back to “Interactive Brokers” (from “Testing IB”). I hope this is an indication they are happy that it is functioning properly. Seems to be working flawlessly for me.
That’s great! I noticed the same but for some issue it is detecting my account twice (might be that the UK account has almost the same name) so I haven’t been able to use it (Mint Support told me my account was coming in twice hence it wouldn’t work). I am going to only select my US account and see if that fixes the issue.
Great post!!! worked like a charm. thanks
You’re welcome!
There is now a tab inside IB account settings for ‘Mint Service’. It is located under Delivery Settings.
Looks like they made it easy on us now! I will update the instructions, thanks for the heads up!
Woo-hoo! Yes they did. I was also having problems getting a correct net value (liquidation value) for my account due to some non-USD-denominated positions. While the integration is still not perfect – e.g. can’t see cost basis for longs/shorts or cash balance within Mint, as far as I can tell, like Fidelity on Mint – the net Interactive Brokers account value used for calculating my net worth in Mint is spot-on. Good enough for what I want to do within Mint – budgeting and overall financial planning.
Yeah, I entirely agree. They also have issues with the correct symbols appearing on the transaction history but as you pointed out all I really care is my net worth and my budget. If I need to see my performance or what not I can just run a report on IB. It would be nice if all that worked so I could see my performance across all my accounts but having what we’ve got is more than half of the battle so I’m thankful for now. I did email them about these issues including the FX and they said their team would review them but they don’t know when they’ll get prioritize. But she did mention they do know of several issues regarding investments, etc.
It took me weeks to find out that there is a bug in the *new* IB Account Management portal for setting up Mint integration. When I went to the classic portal I was able to set up a Mint token instantly and the appropriate working DefaultMint query was created. In the new portal you’d get a query ID reported–but the actual “DefaultMint” query never got built.