First time downloading transactions > only 3 months are downloaded

aksdjfhlk23fkjhsa

I have a business that's existed for years, but I've never put it in Quicken. So today I set up a new Quicken file for it, then connected it to the business's Bank of America account, then asked it to download. It only downloads transactions from the past 3 months, not before.

Is there a way to force it to download all transactions starting on January 1, 2021? That would save me a ton of time...

If that's NOT possible, I'll enter each transaction manually, but could someone help me understand, step-by-step, how to use the Adjustment feature to make everything balance out? (Feel free to point me to a link that explains this.)

Right now, with 3 months downloaded, I can see that Quicken has entered a transaction for today called "Live Opening Balance" with Category "Adjustment" and it's in the exact amount necessary to make Today's Balance exactly agree with what the bank says it is.

jacobs

The length of transactions which download is determined by the financial institution, not Quicken -- and 90 days is pretty typical.

You may have another way to get the oder transactions. Check on your bank's website to see if they provide a way to download transactions. Most do. The key is if they offer a download in QFX or Quicken format. If so, you can likely download the full year of transactions. When the QFX file downloads to your Mac, double-click it to import it into Quicken. Of course, this will duplicate the transactions you've already downloaded. Depending how the bank codes things, it might come in in a separate account or it might come into the existing account, creating lots of duplicate transactions. If you want, you can try creating a new Quicken data file (File > New) before trying to import the downloaded QFX file. 

Frankx

Hi @aksdjfhlk23fkjhsa

You asked "Is there a way to force it to download all transactions starting on January 1, 2021?".  The answer is no you can't force that. BUT you may be able to access such data by manually downloading files from its website.

Generally most financial institutions limit the time frame for downloads to the last 3 months.  But it may be possible to download transactions for some, or all, of your accounts directly from your financial institutions' website(s) by downloading a .QFX file.  The availability of this option depends totally on your financial institution and the timeframe is also determined by them.  The process would require you to download the .QFX file(s) from the FI's website, and then click on them to have them brought into your Quicken datafile.

As to your question on how to go about the process of manually entering transactions for 2021 that are prior to the start date of any downloads you are able to obtain, you first need to understand that what Quicken has done so far (for any accounts you were able to download past transactions for) is to compute an "opening balance" by working backwards from the current account balance according to the bank.  So, for each account they are using the following formula:

Ending Balance of the account (according to the FI's data)                              $ XX,XXX.XX
Plus/Minus the transactions downloaded into Quicken for the last xxx days   $   Y,YYY.YY
                                                                                                                       ----------
Opening balance at the beginning of the transaction download period            $ ZZ,ZZZ.ZZ

That being said, if you manually enter any transactions for any time frame prior to the starting date of the download, you should first make a note of the "ending balance" of each account in Quicken before you make the manual entries, and then - once you've entered those older dated transactions, you should modify the opening balance of the account to maintain the same "ending balance"  that you made note of before you started.

Hope tis helps.  Get back to me if you have any followups.

Frankx

aksdjfhlk23fkjhsa

Thanks to both of you. I didn't know I could download straight from the bank. I was able to do this, saving me valuable time in manually entering transactions.

After importing, it looks like my bottom-line balance is correct, so everything evened out!