Missing transactions (Q Mac)

KMllR

I have a number of accounts at a couple of different banks. I noticed today that one account is missing transactions before a date in June 2021. This is a business checking account so I need all transactions for the calendar year so that I can prepare tax info at the end of the year. Ideally I would like all the info from that account for previous years as well so I can compare income and expenses across years. All of those transactions are missing too; i.e. I ONLY have transactions for mid-June through today showing in that account. Other accounts seem to be fine; one account goes back to 2019, another to 2016. My backup files date to 1.2.21 when I believe I purchased Quicken for Mac and transferred my accounts from Quicken for Mac 2007. Some of the backups are labeled "automatic," others labeled "pre-update." How do I restore the missing transactions preferably back several years?

jacobs

Are you saying that for the account in question, it was part of your Quicken Mac data in the past, and contained data going back several years, and that at some point recently, all the transactions prior to sometime in June 2021 were deleted? Or are you saying that the data for this account was never imported from Quicken 2007 when you updated to modern Quicken Mac at the start of this year? It's not clear whether you're asking about trying to recover missing transaction data from a Quicken Mac backup earlier this year or from your old Quicken 2007 data prior to 2021.

In Quicken Mac, Automatic backups are created when you quit Quicken Mac. Pre-update backups are created by Quicken before it installs each major new version of the software (e.g. 6.2, 6.3, 6.4). 

UKR

Could it be that your account register in Quicken is
- filtered to show only certain transaction types or
- sorted in some unexpected way other than by Date or
- limited to a certain Date Range or
- perhaps only showing the results of a search instead of "all transactions"?

KMllR

@Jacobs For this account all transactions prior to mid-June 2021 appear to be deleted. Everything was there when I upgraded the account in January 2021 to the new Quicken Deluxe (version 6.4.2). Sometime this summer I noticed anomalies in all my accounts (savings accounts showing as checking accounts, wrong balances, etc) and had to sort things out with the help of a Quicken tech person. I got that all sorted but then noticed just the other day that half a year of data is missing in that one account. I don't want to restore from a backup because all the other accounts seem to be fine.

KMllR

@UKR No filters are on for that account. The register is in chronological order showing "all dates" with transactions of "any type" and "any status."

KMllR

I just downloaded the missing data from my bank but all the work I did to categorize transactions of course did not transfer. I can spend some time redoing all of that unless there is a way to get that info from a backup.

jacobs

If it would save you time to import from a backup, here's the process you'd need to do...

First, write down the current balance in the business checking account (if it's correct currently). Next, you have to find the latest backup you have before the transactions were deleted. This may require opening several different backups. Make sure you rename the files as you go along so you don't get confused about which one is your live data file and which ones are backups from various dates.

Once you've found the backup with all the old account transactions, first, make a copy or backup of it... just in case things go wrong. Then delete everything else from this backup file; that is, delete every other account, so you're left with only the one business checking account in your Quicken file. Also delete any transactions in this backup which are in your current live data file, if any. So what you're left with is a Quicken file with only the missing transactions from only the one account. 

Now select File > Export > Quicken Transfer File (QXF). Re-open your live data file. Select File > Import > Quicken Windows File (QXF) and select the QXF file you just exported. This will import the single old account into your current file. It may come in as a separate account from the current version of the account, but that's okay. If it does, open the account you just imported, click on any transaction, Select All so all the transactions are highlighted, and click-and-drag any of the highlighted transactions over to the current version of this account to move all the old transactions in. You may have to delete the existing opening balance transaction, if there is one, and/or create a new opening balance (adjustment) transaction prior to the date of the first transaction in order to get your account balance back to the correct value. 

It's probably less onerous than it sounds, but depending how many accounts you'd need to delete to import this one missing account's transactions, you might find it easier to re-categorize the transactions you imported from the bank and not mess with this restore/purge/export/import process. 

KMllR

Thanks a lot. I'll look into this and see whether I feel confident doing all this.