Why does validate change categories?

Joe Hopwood

After following instructions for the PNC takeover of BBVA and later running validate, all categories containing BBVA were replaced with Unspecified Account. That seems improper. If I just restore a backup before validating, I will still be in danger of same thing happening again if I validate.

Chris_QPW

Depending on what is wrong with a data file, validate may or may not be able to fix it.
What's more its first purpose is to make the data file "consistent".  If it finds a link that is bad it might very well make it consistent by removing the bad information.  Unspecified Account is usually used for a transfer to an account that has been deleted.

Joe Hopwood

Understand maybe if deleted but it was not deleted. Essentially renamed since PNC purchased BBVA. All old transactions should have remained the same. Perhaps what they really should have done was tell you how to transfer to PNC account and maintained the old BBVA account. So every other account that I paid from BBVA now says Unspecified Account. Doing something new does not change history. Validate should not do that. I have done the transfer several times when a master card was compromised and I was given a new card number.

Chris_QPW

If you (or Quicken) didn't delete the account just say rename it, then you really shouldn't have gotten the Unspecified Account.  But note that say one deleted the account, then you would get Unspecified Account in that other accounts right away.  The fact that this is happening while doing validate suggest something else has corrupted the file.  And the result is that as far is it is concerned now that account is missing (even if it isn't), as in all the links to other accounts have been removed as an attempt to make the data file consistent.

Joe Hopwood

But it should just not do that without some warning to user. Do you have time to look into the instructions provided by PNC concerning Quicken and Quickbooks users on the purchase of BBVA? I would like to get my historical transactions back to their proper categories. If you cannot, can you tell me who can. I am not challenging your answer of why it happened just that I presume this will happen to all BBVA customers if they ever need to validate the file and this should not happen.

Chris_QPW

I'm just another user, and I don't use those financial institutions so I can't give you direct feedback on them.  I do see that there are other threads with people doing that conversion and I haven't seen any reports of problems yet.

Your best bet might be to contact Quicken support.

As for issuing a warning about validating and repair I suppose they could put one up every time you start it but it's the nature of that procedure that it may or may not fix a problem and it may or may not cause more problems.  There is no way before starting that they can know what the problems might be or what problems validate might cause.

I do notice that validate always makes a backup before it starts I think that is a pretty good indication that the developers consider the operation not 100% safe.

Joe Hopwood

Thank you. Guess I will get with Quicken. On FB, I saw scads of issues here in this area just getting on line.