Is there a way to set a date range for a specific account used in a transaction report?

MelissaKurtz

My credit card was replaced due fraudulent charges. Now when I download charges for the new card, the charges for the three months prior to the fraud are included. So when running a transaction report for last year for all accounts, the three months of charges on both cards are duplicated in the report. There are hundreds of charges.

Currently I have to find the dupes, change the category on the old card's charges to a placeholder category, and run the report omitting that category. I would like to avoid having to do this for a variety of reasons. If a date range could be specified for the new credit card account for the report, then I could leave the old account data intact and the report would be correct. Is there a way?

jacobs

I don't see how you can balance your accounts if you have duplicate transactions. If you have some of the same credit card transactions in both the old and new accounts, then your total expenses are misstated. Trying to fit this by limiting the dates in a report can fake your way out of this situation, but really your best bet is to take the time to eliminate the duplicate transactions. Since it's pretty much date based, eliminating the duplicates should be pretty easy because you can shift-click to select all the old transactions which downloaded into the new account and delete them with a click. You may need to check them carefully in the few days around the transition point, but you can probably get most of the duplicates in just a minute.

Here's another thought: after you eliminate the duplicates between the two accounts, you might consider moving all the transactions from the old account into the new one. Think about it in terms of the real world: you had two credit card numbers, but only one credit card account. If you combine the transactions in one account in Quicken, then you can reconcile that account against your credit card statement. Moving all the transactions from one account to the other is easy: in one account, select all the transactions, and click and drag them into the destination account in the left sidebar. Once you're sure everything is in order, you can delete the old account (control-click on it in the left sidebar and select Delete from the menu).

The same technique applies to moving all those future-date transactions from the old account to the other. 

Quicken Francisco

Hello @MelissaKurtz

Thank you for reaching out on the community and telling us about your issue. I do apologize for the issue you're having. You could adjust the date for the report so that it doesn't include transactions that are duplicated but that would edit the entire report if you're using other accounts as well so it may not be the best option.

It may be better to try cleaning up the register so that we're able to accurately match the report. Currently is your register balance correct? It should be having issues if you've had duplicates throughout the account. There are a couple of different ways to clean up the register depending on what you'd like but it sounds like you've changed categories to fix the correct spot so we may need to manually delete duplicate transactions and then run the report. 

Depending on what you'd like to do could you let us know and we'll see what the best option is to get you back and running.

Thanks,
Quicken Francisco

MelissaKurtz

Thanks, Francisco. I didn't think there really might be an answer to my question with the current version of Quicken. But since Quicken has recently spent some energy on improving the Report function, I thought maybe my request could be added to the list of possible enhancements under consideration. Given all the credit card thievery happening these days, I can't be the only one with this issue.

Thanks for asking. Yes, I can get my registers to balance. After 32 years of using Quicken, I've worked out a number of routines. I am happy to say all my accounts reconcile to the penny which is why I love Quicken and have been a loyal customer all these years.

At year end, I go through the registers, reconcile all the accounts, put in memo info, finalize tags, and make any needed category adjustments. I just did all that in December to get ready to run reports for preparing our tax returns. Now I need to do it all over again for the replacement credit card. I also need to compare the categories I assigned to the old card's charges to the ones auto assigned by Quicken to the downloaded charges for the new card. Plus I have to add the memo and tag info to the new card's charges. That's been and promises to be quite a bit of work before I'm done .

I just thought that if Quicken could allow for an individual account data range when running reports, that should be a reasonable feature for Quicken to add. It would preserve the info on the old card and keep a report from using duplicate data.
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Another request I have, which I hope you do not mind my mentioning it here, has to do creating future transactions. I find it helpful for projecting cash flow to create known & anticipated future transactions in bank account and credit card registers. In December I created several hundred of these in the credit card register taking me through 12/31/2021. This lets me know how much cash I am going to need to pay the credit card balance each month. I probably will not redo this work for the replacement card because another fraud incident could cause the new credit card to be replaced and there is a limit to how much time I want to spend on this.

But I was wishing that I could copy or move those future transactions to the new card's register. I was thinking that if Quicken could add a copy and paste feature where a register could enter an "edit" mode which would provide check a box for each register item to edit, and then allow for a mass change to the checked items. This could apply to changing categories or tags or memos. It also could allow a mass move or copy of the register items to another account. That would enable me to copy or move all the future transactions to the new credit card.

Food for thought.... Thanks again, Melissa

jacobs

I don't see how you can balance your accounts if you have duplicate transactions. If you have some of the same credit card transactions in both the old and new accounts, then your total expenses are misstated. Trying to fit this by limiting the dates in a report can fake your way out of this situation, but really your best bet is to take the time to eliminate the duplicate transactions. Since it's pretty much date based, eliminating the duplicates should be pretty easy because you can shift-click to select all the old transactions which downloaded into the new account and delete them with a click. You may need to check them carefully in the few days around the transition point, but you can probably get most of the duplicates in just a minute.

Here's another thought: after you eliminate the duplicates between the two accounts, you might consider moving all the transactions from the old account into the new one. Think about it in terms of the real world: you had two credit card numbers, but only one credit card account. If you combine the transactions in one account in Quicken, then you can reconcile that account against your credit card statement. Moving all the transactions from one account to the other is easy: in one account, select all the transactions, and click and drag them into the destination account in the left sidebar. Once you're sure everything is in order, you can delete the old account (control-click on it in the left sidebar and select Delete from the menu).

The same technique applies to moving all those future-date transactions from the old account to the other. 

MelissaKurtz

Thank you so very much, Jacobs. I did not know shift-click works in Quicken or that I could drag transactions to another account. It worked perfectly for the future transactions! A huge help.

I will think about your other suggestion. I like my Quicken accounts to match what the banks and credit card companies have and what actually happened. If I move actual transactions from one card to another, my pee brain will probably have trouble unraveling the situation months later if need be. Plus making sure the beginning balance is correct could be a pain. Now the beginning balance of the new account matches the balance for the respective date in the old account.

The category trick is irritatingly time consuming but makes the reports correct and allows me to verify that the coding of transactions in the new account has all the info from what I did at year end to the old account. Plus I’d rather adjust reporting and coding criteria than change the source data to fit what’s needed.

I am still thinking I would like to be able to tailor a date range for an account within a report’s criteria. Unless, perhaps, you might have another tip for me....

Thanks for your help and time.

jacobs

There's just no way to create a report with different time ranges for different accounts. You can create multiple reports for individual accounts each with their own date range, or a report combining multiple accounts with a single date range.

MelissaKurtz said:

I like my Quicken accounts to match what the banks and credit card companies have and what actually happened.

I agree completely!

I've had credit card accounts breached before, and received new cards with new numbers. In each case, the card company has sent statements clearly showing that there's a single account which had two card numbers, the old one which got suspended and the new replacement one. It wasn't two separate accounts. That's why I suggested combining your transactions into one account in Quicken. (It showed on my statement like an account with some credit cards where my wife and I each have a card with a different number: it listed transactions for one card, then the other card, all within one account statement, one balance, etc.) But perhaps your credit card company handled this differently, and created a truly separate account. If you got separate account statements for the old card and new card, and had two different balances to pay, that's different than what I have experienced each time I've had a card compromised.

In my case, in Quicken, I just continued on with the existing account; there was no new opening balance to take from an old account -- it was just one continuous account. All my reports continued to work as they did before, because there weren't any duplicate entries in two different accounts. In my mind, you're trying to hold onto a way of having duplicate transactions in different Quicken accounts, making them identical in categorization, and then getting reports to avoid the duplicates -- rather than eliminating the duplicates which really didn't exist in the real world of your account and would make your record-keeping simple and straightforward. But again, perhaps I'm not understanding what actually happened, so feel free to disregard these thoughts.

If you truly have two separate accounts with the credit card company, and want to keep that with Quicken, then I still think you'd want to eliminate the duplicate transactions. Make sure the old account has only the transactions which posts to the old card before it was terminated. Make sure the ending balance matches what your provider reports. Then, make one transaction to transfer that balance from the old card to the new card, bringing the old card balance to zero and providing the proper starting balance for the new card. And then continue in the new card account with the transactions charged on the new card. You'd have no duplicate transactions to work around in your reporting, and could clearly see which transactions took place on which card.