Resolving "This account has one or more scheduled reminders. Closure ot this account will delete..."

R DIlly

I recently had a new credit card issued and charge transferred to a new account number. I want to "close" the obsolete account in Quicken. When I go down that path, typing "YES" to confirm I get a pop-up with this message:

"This account has one or more scheduled reminders. Closure ot this account will delete these reminders. Select 'Yes' to proceed."

I've been look for a way to run a report, or better yet filter the "Bill and Income Reminder" on the "Account to use" field - which is NOT a column in that table. If it was, and one could sort on it, that would be a solution also.

I've not been able to find a solution. Frankly, from many years in software design and test, I would suggest this message is deficient. The message alludes to an action to be taken, but it does not offer a path to addess the warning. (IMHO) Any message in well-written software that suggests a user action should provide information on how to resolve the issue. Extra points if the software offers a button to access a tool or report to fix it.

Rocket J Squirrel

R DIlly said:

I recently had a new credit card issued and charge transferred to a new account number. I want to "close" the obsolete account in Quicken.

No, you don't. You want to keep using the existing Quicken account. The only thing that has changed is your account number.

R DIlly said:

Let me offer a little bigger context. At one point when I did a One Step Update, Quicken detected a second account - a credit card account with a new account number from this bank, and I added the new account at that point as Quicken suggested. Perhaps you are suggesting this was a mistake?

We almost always advise keeping Quicken accounts in one-to-one correspondence with real world accounts. This is one rare case where it is just simpler and easier all around not to do so. Closing an account and transferring the assets (or debts) to another account is a complexity which can be avoided. Those extra transactions are superfluous to what is really happening.

Rather than "mistake," I might call this a "learning experience." Maintaining the same Quicken account when a credit card number changes is what we have advised here for many years. To paraphrase Brando in The Godfather, you should have come to us before.

R DIlly said:

I guess I can go to a previous backup and try again - something I seem to have to do with Quicken periodically.

Your choice, depending on how far down the new path you've gone and how much you're invested in it. Since you want to produce reports, that goal may well be best achieved by restoring a backup from before the card number changed and following @NotACPA 's advice above. That's what I would do.

NotACPA

The easiest way to change the account number on a credit card is:

1. Take a backup (just in case)
2. Deactivate the account from download
3. Exit Q and restart Q
4. Enter the account details and delete the old card number
5. Start the reactivation of the account with the new card number.

R DIlly

> @NotACPA said:
> The easiest way to change the account number on a credit card is:* Take a backup (just in case)
> * Deactivate the account from download
> * Exit Q and restart Q
> * Enter the account details and delete the old card number
> * Start the reactivation of the account with the new card number.

In the Account Details widget, I ticked the 3 boxes above the "Close Account" button, which I think is close. The button itself - which seems like what in fact was done with the old (compromised) credit card account - produced this message. I didn't exactly deactivate the account download though. When I connected to the provider at one point, the new card / account showed up and I added it to Quicken. That would be a great place to have dealt with (basically) the change of account number. The balance transfer wasn't entirely clean though in Quicken, and I had to add a fake transaction to zero out the old account to get past reconciliation.

That scenario of replacing a credit card because an account was potentially compromised would seem like a common enough scenario to handle more elegantly?

Rocket J Squirrel

R DIlly said:

> @NotACPA said:
> The easiest way to change the account number on a credit card is:* Take a backup (just in case)
> * Deactivate the account from download
> * Exit Q and restart Q
> * Enter the account details and delete the old card number
> * Start the reactivation of the account with the new card number.

That scenario of replacing a credit card because an account was potentially compromised would seem like a common enough scenario to handle more elegantly?

@NotACPA gave you the "elegant" solution. That solution is to continue using the same Quicken account, just with a new account number. No new account needed.

R DIlly

> @Rocket J Squirrel said:
> @NotACPA gave you the "elegant" solution. That solution is to continue using the same Quicken account, just with a new account number. No new account needed.

I'm sorry - The word "account" is used 3 times above, and perhaps I'm not following.

Let me offer a little bigger context. At one point when I did a One Step Update, Quicken detected a second account - a credit card account with a new account number from this bank, and I added the new account at that point as Quicken suggested. Perhaps you are suggesting this was a mistake? In any event there were *some* transactions between the 2 credit card accounts to transfer the balance; transactions to both accounts were downloaded concurrently. Afterward, there were 2 additional transactions that had been pending downloaded, I think to clean up the closed account (though as mentioned it didn't quite reconcile, so I added a fake transaction as a work-around).

Except for that one glitch, Quicken and what I see on that Bank website match (for the moment they show 2 accounts - one frozen with a $0 balance, is now hidden in Quicken). To the degree I follow the suggestion here, it's not clear to me that these two views of the history would be modeled the same way. I'm not sure how the transactions between the two accounts to transfer the balance (from the Bank's perspective) would be handled if (assuming I follow the suggestion made correctly) there was only one account in Quicken.

Depending on the usage, I have one online account with which I login into the bank. In the Password Vault, there is one password for the institution. Within that online account, there are two credit accounts - one now closed with a zero balance - both at the Bank and in Quicken.

I guess I can go to a previous backup and try again - something I seem to have to do with Quicken periodically.

Rocket J Squirrel

R DIlly said:

I recently had a new credit card issued and charge transferred to a new account number. I want to "close" the obsolete account in Quicken.

No, you don't. You want to keep using the existing Quicken account. The only thing that has changed is your account number.

R DIlly said:

Let me offer a little bigger context. At one point when I did a One Step Update, Quicken detected a second account - a credit card account with a new account number from this bank, and I added the new account at that point as Quicken suggested. Perhaps you are suggesting this was a mistake?

We almost always advise keeping Quicken accounts in one-to-one correspondence with real world accounts. This is one rare case where it is just simpler and easier all around not to do so. Closing an account and transferring the assets (or debts) to another account is a complexity which can be avoided. Those extra transactions are superfluous to what is really happening.

Rather than "mistake," I might call this a "learning experience." Maintaining the same Quicken account when a credit card number changes is what we have advised here for many years. To paraphrase Brando in The Godfather, you should have come to us before.

R DIlly said:

I guess I can go to a previous backup and try again - something I seem to have to do with Quicken periodically.

Your choice, depending on how far down the new path you've gone and how much you're invested in it. Since you want to produce reports, that goal may well be best achieved by restoring a backup from before the card number changed and following @NotACPA 's advice above. That's what I would do.

R DIlly

So I (and others) understand the recommendation, this applies only in this specific scenario, i.e. replacing a credit card.

So replaying what I experienced, when the One Step update shows a new account for the credit card Bank, that should be "mapped into the existing account". I don't know the exact language here, and I can add notes after I attempt it.

The only concern I have, and I'll check it, I think a single update contained transactions across two credit card account numbers. Rolling back, I expect I'll run into that again.

Rocket J Squirrel

R DIlly said:

So I (and others) understand the recommendation, this applies only in this specific scenario, i.e. replacing a credit card.

So replaying what I experienced, when the One Step update shows a new account for the credit card Bank, that should be "mapped into the existing account". I don't know the exact language here, and I can add notes after I attempt it.

The only concern I have, and I'll check it, I think a single update contained transactions across two credit card account numbers. Rolling back, I expect I'll run into that again.

This recommendation applies whenever any account type changes its account number and nothing else.

If you go back to a backup from before the account number change and follow the recommendation to continue using the same Quicken account, you will doubtless receive downloaded transactions which do not apply. Since you're not changing accounts, any downloaded transactions moving dollars from one account to another should just be deleted. It will all come out right if you get rid of inapplicable transactions.

R DIlly

> @Rocket J Squirrel said:
> This recommendation applies whenever any account type changes its account number and nothing else.If you go back to a backup from before the account number change and follow the recommendation to continue using the same Quicken account, you will doubtless receive downloaded transactions which do not apply. Since you're not changing accounts, any downloaded transactions moving dollars from one account to another should just be deleted. It will all come out right if you get rid of inapplicable transactions.

This mostly worked, but besides inapplicable transactions, I had to do some other cleanup / fiddling. For anyone else trying this suggestion, which fundimentally worked better than trying to replicate what I saw on the bank website, I want to offer a couple points that may be obvious to most, but I had to think through.

Upon the "reactivation" part, Quicken by default wanted to add new accounts. I changed the default settings to ignore what was the old/existing (in Quicken) account, and linked the new account to the existing Quicken account.
(Activate_One_Step_Update.jpg)

I don't fully understand how reconciliation works with credit cards but mine were set up to do an automatic reconciliation (which may not be the right term). I never manually reconciled them to a statement before, but I think a setting got changed in reactivating. In any event, at one point the online balance appears to have been set to $0. From the bank's perspective the exist 2 accounts right now, one of which does have a zero balance. I got the "Cleared Balance" to match what the bank gave as the online balance, while the "Statement Ending Balance" was zero, which I believe forced me to create an adjustment record. I deleted that afterward and everything looked right.
(Reconcile_Adjust_Balance.jpg)

Actually, that's not quite true. I had a few old transactions that showed up as unreconciled in this reconciliation dialog that I hadn't seen before. Afterward I cleaned them up as I was deleting the transactions the bank created in transferring some transactions and the balance between accounts.

To me, personally, the 5 steps sound pretty simple. The fiddling however, made this a bit less "elegant" than I would have hoped for. A couple times a year, it seems I have to spend a couple hours fiddling. Sometimes a bank changed something, sometimes a Quicken update. It occurs often enough over many years that I usually catch and address it pretty quickly which helps.

Thanks folks-

joecg

Discussion on this thread sensibly shifted to solving the underlying need in a different way. However, I've arrived at this thread with the same problem that the OP elected to put in the subject -- This message and the information provided to the user are inadequate.

I've gone through my Reminders and can't identify one that would be causing this message.
If Quicken has identified Reminders that will be deleted -- WHICH ONES?

This should be fixed.

Quicken Anja

Hello @joecg,

Thank you for taking the time to visit the Community, however, since this is an older post that was originally created back in October of 2021, it is less likely to receive an answer now.

I would suggest creating a new post for better visibility and to potentially receive responses from other users who may currently be experiencing the same problem. Doing so will also assist us with better tracking ability in the event that this issue may result in an escalation being required.

Please be sure to include a description of the issue, any error messages as well as the version of Quicken you have currently running (Help > About Quicken). The more information you are able to provide will help the Community to better understand and assist.

Thank you!