tedium re accepting transactions

pdxmaven

First, thanks so much to those who have been helping me with these "newbie" questions. I am getting there, thanks to your advice, in downloading years of transactions over multiple accounts.
Re. accepting transactions: is there some reason to accept each transaction, one at a time? If so, I can't figure out what that reason might be? Is it maybe different because I am just beginning this project, for each of many accounts; and after I am caught up, then I might switch to "accept all" for all the news transactions?
Also, as I am accepting each transaction (doing it now one at a time until I hear otherwise from you), it is making me crazy for this reason: I have transactions going back to mid-2018. However, I am starting with 1/1/2019 to start categorizing, just for time reasons as I am trying to get 2019 done to facilitate doing my taxes. Each time I "accept" a transaction in 2019, say in April 2019, Quicken then "pops back" to say, December 2019. Each time. And then I have to use the mouse to go back to the next transaction I am dealing with in April 2019.
Very tedious and time consuming.
I had hoped I could "accept" 4 or 5 transactions at a time, but if there is a way to do that, I couldn't figure out what it was.
Maybe the problem is that I have these "unaccepted" transactions from 2018 "in front of" the 2019 ones which makes going back to my next transaction in 2019 more problematic?

splasher

I always accept them one at a time so that I see every transaction, but I am in a "caught up" state.

If I was doing an initial build like you are, I would probably do an "Accept All" and then sort the register by Payee, select ranges of the transactions, right click on one of the highlighted transactions and select "Edit" to get to a find & replace pop-up to change the Category on the group.

Now, this is probably on a workable situation if you are always going to categorize everything from "Kroger" as groceries and "JCPenney" as clothing, you get the idea.

The big thing is to make sure that anything that has tax reporting consequences is properly categorized with a tax line associated with the category.

NotACPA

"If you are always going to categorize everything from "Kroger" as groceries "

The problem there is that Kroger is also my pharmacy, and also my wine store and also where we frequently buy books/magazines, and it's our gas station and we buy soap/shampoo/TP/paper-towels/etc. there.  ALL of which go into categories other than "Groceries".

And, even if a particular purchase is only groceries, there's also Sales Tax which is deductible on our IRS tax return because my state doesn't have an income tax ... so Sales Tax gets split out also.

pdxmaven

thanks for the input so far. I think perhaps I wasn't clear.
I am talking about the entries in the lower box, where I "accept entries into the register." I think that's where they first "land", once downloaded from my bank. Once I "accept" each entry , they appear above (in what I assume is my register), and that's where I categorize them. So I'm talking about the tediousness of accepting each entry from my bank into my register.
I have two books on Quicken and I read about this in there. They advise doing it one entry at a time, seemingly to catch fraud or errors. But wouldn't I see that when they are in my register and I am categorizing them there?

splasher

Like I stated, doing them one at a time is my preferred method, but I'm not trying to do a year and a half of catch-up.  I download my transactions multiple times a week so that I never have many to deal with and those that I do have are recent and I know the what/why and if they are fraud.
Like I stated earlier, if I was in your position, I'd do an "Accept All", sort by Payee and do them in groups.  You need to decide what you are most comfortable with and do it.

UKR

I would try and do it chronologically, oldest unaccepted transaction first. And I'd work with Quicken and select and accept whichever next transaction it wants me to work with.

BTW, there's a button to "Hide accepted" transactions. have you selected that?

LongTimeQUser

As Splasher stated above, if you "Accept All" you can then "Sort" or even make a "Category Report" or "Payee Report" and "Edit" several or sometimes all items at a time.