FAQ: I have a manual account I want to activate for downloading, how do I prevent duplicates

splasher

I have an existing account (several years old) and I want to activate One Step Update for it and download transactions, but the first download brings down lots of transactions that are duplicates of my existing transactions.

How do I prevent duplication of transactions?

OR

How do I get rid of a bunch of transactions in the Downloaded Transactions tab?

splasher

You are at the mercy of the financial institution on the first download.  They may go back 30 days or more, typically 90 days.


The way to deal with it is to make sure in Preferences (Downloaded transactions section) that "auto enter" is NOT checked.


Make a backup, do not skip this step, if you are unhappy with the results that follow, you can restore your data to this condition.


The next thing is to put in a $0 transaction as a marker so that you know where your last transaction was before starting.


Then, do a Ctrl+Shift+E while in the account (takes you to the Account Detail screen), select the Online Services tab and activate One Step Update.  During this process, make sure that you "link" and NOT "add" the account to the existing account.


You will then end up with a bunch of transactions in the Download Transactions tab at the bottom of the register.


Some will be labeled as "new", others as "match".  Scroll down and find the first one marked "match", select it, click on the edit button and select "Make all New".  Now all of the transactions will be marked new and none will be matched to existing transactions.


Now, you will click on the Accept All button and they will be entered into the register (don't worry, you made the backup didn't you).


Next, sort the register by "order entered" by clicking on the Action list gear icon in the upper right corner of the register.  In the list will be sorting options and under it will be by Order Entered .


Now, all of the newly added transactions should be at the bottom of the register in a group.  Find the $0 marker transaction you entered earlier and click on the first new transaction below it, then scroll to the bottom of the register, hold down the Shift key and click on the last transaction.  That should highlight all of the newly entered transactions.  Right click on one of the highlighted transactions and select delete transaction(s) from the list.


Your register should now be back to the starting condition (except for the marker which you can also delete) and since Quicken has now seen that initial group of downloaded transactions, it will ignore them in the future based on the unique FITID that was assigned to each of them by the financial institution.  Therefore, future downloads will not have any of that history included in them.

NOTE:  If there are some of those downloaded transactions that you wish to keep, just don't delete them from the register.


You could also accept them from the Downloaded Transactions tab prior to starting this whole process so that they would be above the "marker" transaction.

The next download will pick up where the last one left off and if the system should download a transaction a second time, Quicken should ignore it based on the FITID (mentioned earlier) because it will know that it has already been seen in the past.