Re: downloaded transactions - "accept all" or do one by one

pdxmaven

sorry for slightly lengthly explanation here -
unfortunately I am not (yet) one of those who is totally on top of all this, since starting with Quicken last year. So I am now dealing with ALL of 2020. I have downloaded all the transactions from my back. I have nothing in my register from 2020.
So I have not matched any 2020 Quicken transactions with my bank statement, or checked how Quicken has categorized transactions . That is what I am embarking on now.
I believe when I did this for my 2019 transactions, I had my bank statement in hand, and accepted the transactions one by one, matching each one with my bank statement. It was somewhat laborious. But pretty failsafe.
But I assume I could do something similar once they are in my register. Or is it better to do it as I am "accepting" them?
IN general, what are the reasons I might want to "accept " the transactions into my register one by one rather than "accept all "

Chris_QPW

EDITED for some typos in the matching explanation.

In my opinion Accept All is rarely the right choice.  Some people have said that they use it after the have checked all the transactions to be correct.  Why they didn't just use Accept while checking I have never understood.

I suppose in your case if you knew exactly what date range of transactions you imported you could use Accept All and then go through that date range in your register and make sure they are correct.  But there is a big problem even with that.  Even though you don't have any transactions in the register that you think should be matched Quicken matching is terrible in this situation.  Quicken's matching doesn't go by date.  It picks the first transaction that has been manually entered and has yet to be matched to a downloaded transaction.  In the past that could have resulted in matching years old transactions.  These days I think they restrict it to a certain period like 90 days, but there is still the potential of a mismatch.  And here is where it gets really bad.  Once you do Accept All or Accept for that matter, there isn't any indication that a transaction in the register is a matched one.

So at minimum you need to at least look over the transactions that have Match if there are any.  Luckily Quicken will sort those at the beginning.

A better choice in my opinion for people that want to do this kind of checking of the transactions in the register would be to turn on this mode:


With this the transaction go directly into the register, but unlike Accept All there is an indication of which ones are New and New Match.  A "Status" column is turned on (has a blue dots in the column header).  It has icons like a red pencil, blue pencil, but you can expand it and see the text like New and New Match.

It looks like this:


This is the "review" process opposed to the "accept" process.

Clicking on the status brings up this menu.

Marking it reviewed clears the status column.  Also if you edit and save the transaction it will clear the status column.  Another way to clear the status is to reconcile the transactions.  You need to scan the transactions to make sure that they have the right categories, and aren't matched wrong before doing the reconcile since a reconcile doesn't care about such things only that the amounts are correct.  But it is a quick way to get a group of transactions marked as reviewed/clear the status (which is the same thing).
Here is the same ones after I have marked the first two reviewed.


Watch out for Mark all reviewed.  It marks all of the transactions in the register reviewed and the only way to reverse it would be go back to an old copy of your data file.

Here is an example of the New Match menu, just in case you do get a false match you can use Un-match this transaction.

Chris_QPW

EDITED for some typos in the matching explanation.

In my opinion Accept All is rarely the right choice.  Some people have said that they use it after the have checked all the transactions to be correct.  Why they didn't just use Accept while checking I have never understood.

I suppose in your case if you knew exactly what date range of transactions you imported you could use Accept All and then go through that date range in your register and make sure they are correct.  But there is a big problem even with that.  Even though you don't have any transactions in the register that you think should be matched Quicken matching is terrible in this situation.  Quicken's matching doesn't go by date.  It picks the first transaction that has been manually entered and has yet to be matched to a downloaded transaction.  In the past that could have resulted in matching years old transactions.  These days I think they restrict it to a certain period like 90 days, but there is still the potential of a mismatch.  And here is where it gets really bad.  Once you do Accept All or Accept for that matter, there isn't any indication that a transaction in the register is a matched one.

So at minimum you need to at least look over the transactions that have Match if there are any.  Luckily Quicken will sort those at the beginning.

A better choice in my opinion for people that want to do this kind of checking of the transactions in the register would be to turn on this mode:


With this the transaction go directly into the register, but unlike Accept All there is an indication of which ones are New and New Match.  A "Status" column is turned on (has a blue dots in the column header).  It has icons like a red pencil, blue pencil, but you can expand it and see the text like New and New Match.

It looks like this:


This is the "review" process opposed to the "accept" process.

Clicking on the status brings up this menu.

Marking it reviewed clears the status column.  Also if you edit and save the transaction it will clear the status column.  Another way to clear the status is to reconcile the transactions.  You need to scan the transactions to make sure that they have the right categories, and aren't matched wrong before doing the reconcile since a reconcile doesn't care about such things only that the amounts are correct.  But it is a quick way to get a group of transactions marked as reviewed/clear the status (which is the same thing).
Here is the same ones after I have marked the first two reviewed.


Watch out for Mark all reviewed.  It marks all of the transactions in the register reviewed and the only way to reverse it would be go back to an old copy of your data file.

Here is an example of the New Match menu, just in case you do get a false match you can use Un-match this transaction.

pdxmaven

thanks Chris for this really thorough and helpful explanation, complete with pics, etc.
Just to be clear, I am dealing with 2020 transactions. And I am far behind, so have not entered any 2020 transactions myself into the register - though there are some there from 2018 and 2019, which I do understand could be a problem in that Quicken could unhelpfully (but wrongly) match them for me.
Would your advice still apply in this situation where I have nothing from 2020 already in my register - only just this "stack" of 2020 transactions that I just now downloaded from my bank

Chris_QPW

In your case I based on how I believe the current matching is working (not going back years for the match), I think you could use Accept All without any problems for this use case.  I wouldn't suggest if for an ongoing practice once you have gotten up to date.

Personally I like/use the "automatically enter transactions" mode over the Downloaded Transactions tab method for the simple fact that I can deal with them all in the register.  But it is important to note that it is different than Accept All because you can easily see what transactions are new and which ones aren't.

Chris_QPW

BTW there isn't anything that stops you from switching automatic entry mode to get caught up, and then switch back to the other mode for new transactions if you like that mode better.

NotACPA

I only use "Accept All" when every downloaded transaction in the account is Matched with one that I had previously input manually.  Otherwise, it's one-by-one.

Chris_QPW

NotACPA said:

I only use "Accept All" when every downloaded transaction in the account is Matched with one that I had previously input manually.  Otherwise, it's one-by-one.

Do you check that they all matched to the correct transaction or just assume they did?