Corrupt Account/Categories/????

PutterFlutters

I recently discovered that one of my credit card accounts appears to be corrupted.  

• Discovered during attempted reconcile.
• Manifested by unbalanced reconciliation.
• Even when "Adjusted" the next reconciliation would be unbalanced.
• Apparently corrupt Catagories file.

Went back quite a while trying to find an offending entry or....  but to no avail.

During one of my adventures I generated a category listing and found that some catagories looks normal i.e.  

Investment
or 

Interest Earned

but some were entries like:
017750C0-FD66-4C16-A780-A8591B31571E
or 
632E1F22-9FFE-4B56-8566-DE6D207C14F3

I've got a hunch this is going to be a long process and this submission is see if anyone might have a suggestion as how to proceed in right direction.  What more info is pertinent.

OR..... maybe it is a lost cause....    :-(

Thanks in advance....

jacobs

I haven't seen reports of the first part of what you wrote above, but there have been a number of users who have reported the issue of Category names being turned into the long string of numbers and letters you mention at the end. (See here and here.) I know that issue has been passed through to the development team for investigation, but don't believe there are any answers or fixes at this time. (I flagged your comment for the site moderator who is familiar with this issue, so she may reach out to you for additional information.)

Unfortunately, the only solution I know of would be to revert to a backup prior to the problem surfacing, which may require some trial and error to test various backups. (Always make a copy of any backup file before you open it, so you have an untouched backup available should you need to go back to it later.)

Quicken_Tyka

Hello @PutterFlutters

Thank you for taking the time to visit the Community to report this issue.

In regards to the reconcile issue, the root cause of a reconcile discrepancy can be difficult to troubleshoot here on the Community, without being able to actively walk through the reconciliation of the account. I can still offer a few suggestions.

First, I would look at the opening balance on the account in question. Has a new opening balance been created? Is this opening balance reconciled?

 Did you ever encounter any transactions that were previously reconciled that needed to be reconciled in the following reconciliation when you noticed this issue?

In regards to the category issue,I have a few questions to help me better understand what could be happening to collect more information.

First, may I ask that you navigate to Quicken > Preferences > Connected services and select the blue "Reset" to reset the cloud.

After this has been completed, are the categories still incorrect?

As far as you're able to tell does this seem to affect all manually created categories or there any parent categories in the category list that have not been changed?

To view the category list, please navigate to Window > Categories.

Please let me know!
-Quicken Tyka

PutterFlutters

Oops... I replied directly to your (jacobs) other communication.  Hope that will hold for now.  Will used this system from now on.  I can cut and paste that reply here if you wanted it.  Just noticed the "NO REPLY" on your email address.
Thanks,
Norm

jacobs

@PutterFlutters  When you get an email from this system, it notifies you that a reply was posted in the thread -- but you can't reply via email. You need to click on the "Check it out" blue button at the bottom of the email to bring you back to this forum to post a reply.

PutterFlutters

Sorry... I'm a slow learner I guess. Will stick to the system

PutterFlutters

0K... Back to the original situation..... Unable to SUCCESSFULLY reconcile then SUCCESSFULLY "ADJUST" a Quicken 2020 Credit Card account.  
Might a corrupt CATEGORIES file be the problem?

Trying to do a little research on the original problem of a corrupt CATEGORIES list/file.  
I wanted to compare my corrupt CATEGORY listing with a brand new category list so I loaded Quicken onto my laptop. (Working(?) copy of Quicken is on an iMac).
It was a bit of struggle (my laptop initial install was Quicken 15 and I was told my account had expired so I could't upgrade to 2020. ....

.... funny because quicken.com said I was good until 2021 and my iMac was running 2020.  Anyway a couple restarts and such 2020 up and running on the laptop.

Back to the original situation.....again....

The newly installed laptop Quicken appears to have a pristine CATEGORY list (Yippe? or so what?)

My quest it so see how the corrupt CATEGORIES file differs from the pristine file.

Soooo... now that I can compare Corrupt to Pristine.....
#1 question is....  can a corrupt CATEGORIES file be edited by a user?
#2 if so... might there be any chance of the previously corrupted CATEGORY file being resurrected in order to regaining a functional app using a previously corrupt Quicken Credit Card account?

Hope I didn't loose too many folks.

Thanks,
Putter

jacobs

@PutterFlutters  The problem is that none of us here know what causes this corruption of the Category list that a small number of users have experienced. So we don't know what's wrong and whether it can be permanently fixed.

If you're asking if there's a way to import a clean category list into your messed up one, the answer is no. Categories are a table within Quicken's SQL database, and can't be imported like is list of stock prices. You can certainly try editing categories which have the long string of numbers back to their original names where you can figure out what they should be. You can delete categories which show in the Category window as Unused. And perhaps you can thus manually set your Category list back to some semblance of normal. Will you then forever be in the clear? I don't think any of us can tell you that, because we don't know what the source of this problem is.

Did you follow the steps @Quicken_Tyka posted five posts above this? I don't see that you ever replied to her post. She has been monitoring the users who report this corruption and gathering data to pass on to the developers. 

PutterFlutters

Hi Tyka,  Hope you are reading this too.
AND thanks Jacobs for jumping in.
=================================
I've been following Tyka's suggestions with some interesting results. None of which (so far) help. The journey has been interesting but only raised a few more questions.  I'm pretty sure my conjecture that something is corrupted is true and slowly I am getting tired of exploring and hoping for the best. :-/

I did delete the unused categories and confirm there was an opening balance adjustment.

OBTW... appears Quicken's support on HOW TO was only for windows but a bit of Googling and found it was even simpler Mac instructions.

I did reconcile but I didn't notice and transactions that needed to be re-reconciled but I may have missed them.  Didn't really understand that one.

I did the reset but didn't notice anything.  That categories (neither manual or standard)
didn't correct as far as I can tell.

During the process of attmepint to remove the corrupted catagory names I did get each time I restored a catagory name from corrupt to "factory installed" I would get..



Don't have a clue as to whether I should your shouldn't have but I did MERGE them. 

THEN!!!! I noticed that the Top portion of the Corrupted list (on the iMac) wasn't there (as it was on the new catagory list on the laptop.  If when I get time I will try and create a few of the missing "Factory Installed" and see what happen. 

Kind of a fun ride so far... but I haven't left the barn really.  :-)

Thanks again to both of you.




 

ddcolby1

I too am having this problem and I can tell you that it started immediately after the latest upgrade (build 100 for Premier 2020) I reconciled the previous day with no problem. On opening Mac the following day I was informed that an upgrade was ready and I selected install. I then ran a download for all accounts and Quicken promptly changed my credit union accounts, corrupting past entries for the entire history of my files. I have used Quicken since 1999.

I downloaded a backup and once again got the corruption on running the Update Accounts routine.

I then deleted the corrupted accounts and recreated them. For three days Quicken did not even recognize 2 of 3 accounts in one credit union account. After more deletion and recreation Quicken finally saw all 3 accounts and downloaded correctly (I think)

Two days later the dowloads are again corrupted for the credit union accounts

ddcolby1

Let me be more specific. By corrupted I mean that entries that had been registered in my checking account suddenly appeared in my savings account and were removed from checking. In addition all account balances were altered and were incorrect.

When I first recreated the accounts for download Quicken added my login ID to the account name and listed that in the register, but only did that for the checking account, not the savings. In addition I have a money market account and that too was altered with an incorrect balance and deposits and withdrawals that were not a correct.

Quicken_Tyka

Hello @ddcolby1

Thank you for taking the time to visit the Community to report your issue, I just want to clarify what exactly you are experiencing.

Are you encountering changes to the categories in your Quicken file? Are the categories now listed in a style similar to the examples below?

017750C0-FD66-4C16-A780-A8591B31571E

632E1F22-9FFE-4B56-8566-DE6D207C14F3

If you are encountering something different, please create a new post for better visibility.

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7849429/how-to-add-a-post-to-the-community

Be sure to include a description of the issue, any error messages as well as the version of Quicken.

The more information you can provide will help the Community to better understand and assist.

Thank you,

-Quicken Tyka

PutterFlutters

Hi Jacobs... going to go back and chat a bit about your earlier posts re: the Category Tables.  Maybe we can come up with something.

It has been decades (I used to work with punch cards) since I played the DB games.  I am sure I will get the terminology screwed up but I will jump in regardless.  :-)

I ASSUME:

That QUICKEN is a Relational DB application. (sounds like SQL powered maybe)

That each of the selections available under Quicken's WINDOW menu is a DB table (forgot what those are called ... indexes?) unto itself.

That the Category List is a DB Table containing the fields pertinent

That users can manipulate the Category List by adding/deleting/modifying the data in those fields.

That some of us have a corrupted Category Lists.

That MAYBE...just Maybe a user could modify the Category List and restore the functionality that is corrupt/missing/????

It is a low probability but maybe restoring Category List Table to its original form and content MIGHT just MIGHT fix something. (I've been witness to that type of thing a few times before)

I am fairly sure I can modify the man readable offending text fields contents and replace them with the original text characters

Will this work????  I'm not betting my IRA on it. :-). But you never know.  Quite a bit of the world around us has been designed by geniuses to be used by those of us who might feel like lesser geniuses.

If the Quicken data base is still in functional but filled with corrupt data then maybe there is a chance. Yuhjustneverknow.   :-)

/s/ a MUCH MUCH lesser genius. :-)

ddcolby1

Quicken_Tyka, It is none of the examples you have suggested so I will make a new post on this. There are no error messages, just account transactions being recorded in the wrong accounts. i.e. Money Market deposits entered into the checking account and checking account deductions being recorded in the money market.

PutterFlutters

Wow... it is MUCH worse (at least for me) than I thought.
I was originally working with just one credit card account because that was where I first saw the problem.
Well... I decided to examine another credit cards and then some checking accounts.
All appear to have about the same types of problems.
And as I look back... Just as ddcolby1 said... I first noticed the problem after the last upgrade.
1. I have backups but I am really not looking forward to restoring (copies of the backup of course) if my current version of quicken is the problem.

(Mac)
Version 5.17.3 (Build 517.34913.100)...macOS 10.15.6

Either a very few of us are down right unlucky or there is going to be a lot more "interest" in this.

Quicken_Tyka

Hello @PutterFlutters

Thank you for your response and additional information.

There have been a handful of posts on this issue and it is currently being researched however this is no immediate fix.

The good news is so far, most users have reported that either restoring a backup or manually editing the categories has been enough to correct the issue.

If you sync to mobile, you may want to see if the steps in a previous discussion work to correct the issue for you.

Let me know how it goes!

-Quicken Tyka

PutterFlutters

Hi Tyka,
I am not the confident in my current Quicken installation/data file and intend to:

1. delete/reinstall the app
2. load a backup data file

then go from there.  

If you think this unwise please let me know.

Thanks, Putter

NotACPA

Do NOT do a Windows Delete to uninstall.  It won't get everything.

Use QCleanUI (the Quicken deletion tool) instead.

https://www.quicken.com/support/using-qcleanui-uninstall-quicken

jacobs

NotACPA said:

Do NOT do a Windows Delete to uninstall.  It won't get everything.

Use QCleanUI (the Quicken deletion tool) instead.

This thread is about Quicken Mac.

PutterFlutters

:-) Thanks NotACPA.  I just about walked into that.  Since I have Parallels loaded I get myself into corners like that WAY too often.

PutterFlutters

Giving up the repair concept.  Going for the backup restore. Going to be MUCH less work.