On the off chance this helps someone who faces the same weird Quickbooks error we did, here’s the resolution to this strange problem we recently encountered. I’m using Quickbooks Premier 2006 and have it setup to automatically connect to our Bank Of America account and pull all transactions from the various sub acounts. This simplifies the data entry in Quickbooks considerably.

It stopped working last week however with an error that had a ton of junk and the error code OL-323. Turns out while we were at OSCON a few weeks ago, someone sniffed Kimbro’s credit card and tried to buy $2700 worth of flowers. BofA immediately recognized the transaction as fraud and suspended the account. They have since closed it entirely so it no longer appears in our online dashboard but Quickbooks was still trying to pull transactions from that account. The fix: deactivate the online access for that account in Quickbooks (chart of accts > right-click edit acct > online tab > uncheck online access).

You’d certainly think Inuit could throw a more descriptive error message or at least allow the connection to pull data from the working accounts since it wasn’t an issue of authetication… Anyways, a week later having dealt with both BofA and Intuit, this turned out to be the resolution to this issue. Lesson learned: don’t send sensitive data over untrusted wifi at a conference of 2700 techies all using the same connection. Even when using SSL and presumably connecting to a legit wifi hotspot, people can emulate an access point by broadcasting their own wifi signal under an SSID like “OSCON wifi,” intercept your connection and perform a man-in-the-middle attack to steal your info.