Problem
You are not able to connect Wells Fargo to your QuickBooks account. Specifically, you get a message that claims to be unable to verify your identity when you go to do it.
Cause
Wells Fargo keeps tweaking their security model under the hood. They have the best intentions, but they don't communicate well to Intuit or to their customers.
What's happening is that your Wells Fargo account(s) need to validate something you've entered, but it doesn't tell you what because it's trying to protect your privacy. Unfortunately, that means you don't know what to fix because you don't see anything wrong.
In 99% of cases, their system has temporarily "blocked" a mobile number you entered for the account.
Wells Fargo does not support Google Voice or any similar such service (yet they DO support Google Fi). They claim that it's due to not supporting shortcodes, but Google Voice DOES support shortcodes that are sent the normal way. It does NOT support shortcodes that are sent via email relay (which is what Wells is trying to do). For example, {phonenumber}@vzw.com would send an SMS to Verizon. Google has no such structure in place, thus the error.
It's basically bad coding. Especially since you can send SMS directly through code using freely available open source tools.
For T-Mobile, there is actually a setting the user would have to enable to allow the code to come in.
Majority of the time, it's the way Wells is trying to send a short code to your phone that doesn't work, and instead of them fixing it, they just give you an ambiguous error.
Solution(s)
- For your mobile number, give them an actual carrier number. If you use T-mobile, find that flag and enable it BEFORE you add it to Wells. Any other carrier should just work as long as it's a paid carrier and not Google Voice or similar service online that isn't really a "phone".
- Go to a Wells Fargo ATM (no, I'm serious) and log in. Go to Settings --> Wells Fargo Services, and you'll see an option to "Verify Phone Number". Just click the green Confirm button. That's it. 99% chance you've fixed the issue.
--OR--
In the portal under the security settings, you can order an RSA SecurID token. This would generate the same number they would send to your mobile phone. You have to wait 5-7 business days for it and there's a charge ($25, I think) but it negates having to do the mobile phone route entirely.
No matter which way you go, once it's done and you try to connect to QuickBooks, it should now correctly prompt you for a code instead of erroring out. The rest should go without incident.
Clearly, this would be less of an issue if they would use visual management and just tell the user that they want to prompt them for a code, they cannot do so, and need the user to verify their mobile phone number OR order the RSA token before proceeding.
