Cannot add new entries Cash account typed as "Asset" after conversion from 2017 deluxe to starter

noexit23

I've been using Quicken for almost 10 years now and I upgraded from my CD install of 2017 Deluxe to "Starter" as the annual fee of almost $52 seemed high for me and all I do is track my checking and credit card accounts. However, I've discovered that I can no longer enter transactions into my 2 "Cash" accounts. These are accounts I manually created years ago to track my "cash" spending between my spouse and I. When I created these accounts I classified their types as "Asset". However, it seems now that I've "downgraded" I can no longer add transactions to these unless I upgrade to Premium.
After 2 HOURS on the phone with tech support, I've been told that there is no way to correct this. This is just a database program of sorts. Certainly there must be some way to re-tag these accounts as something else. Interestingly they are NOT "Investment" accounts. But the new software seems to track "Asset" Account types as "Investments".

I've tried uninstalling Quicken Starter and reinstalling my old 2017 Deluxe but alas I cannot change the account type there either.

Anyone have any suggestions?

Sherlock

I suggest you create new Cash accounts.  You may attempt to move the transactions (move, copy, export/import) and delete (or keep separate) the original accounts.  You may want to review: FAQ: How Do I Move Transactions Between Quicken Accounts?

UKR

I'm not sure if you can do that with the rather restricted Starter Edition, but ...

If you created these Cash accounts as "Type = Cash" or "Type = Checking", there always is the option of changing where in the Account Bar the accounts are being displayed. Go into Edit Account Details for these accounts, select the Display Options tab and change "Account Intent" from Asset to Spending.

noexit23

Thanks guys for the guidance on this. I tried earlier to move transactions into a "new" cash account but the process was so laboriously slow that I gave up. There's transactions in my database going back to around 2014 and my QDF file is 85mb-ish. To improve overall performance I'm considering "archiving" out a few of the older years of data into an archive file. Can you recommend a "best practice" way of archiving data? Or, is 85mb a reasonable size for my QDF file and perhaps my performance woes are due to something else? I don't have the fastest system in the world but I did upgrade my hard drive recently to SSD and I have 16 mb of ram. I'm not convinced, however, that I don't have some other system-wide performance lags and I might be due for a "fresh" windows reinstall. Thanks again so much for your guidance.

Greg_the_Geek

Archiving out old transactions will not improve performance unless you have a very large amount of investment transactions. 85 MB is not a large data file. Mine is 108 MB and I don't have any performance problems. For more information, from Quicken, Help --> Hold the Ctrl key down and select About Quicken. Please post a screenshot here.

noexit23

Here's a screenshot of my version.


To summarize, the problem is that in my older versions of Quicken years ago I had created my "Cash" accounts as "Assets". Made sense to me at the time. However with this new version of Quicken (mine is Starter because I don't need the investing part nor the high annual fee for Deluxe) I can no longer add new transactions to my Cash accounts which have an Account Type as "Asset". Further we cannot change the Account Type without likely some kind of very proprietary Database Editing feature of which I have yet to procure (give me time and I might...). The error in Quicken states that I must have "Premier or greater" to add new transactions into this account. No way I'm paying extra to solve this problem which appears to be a neglect on Quicken to think of the implications of assessing these Payment Tier subscription limitations on existing and perhaps formerly loyal customers.

I think I'm on to a rather "manual" work around: 1) Create 2 new offline Cash accounts (one each for my spouse and myself). 2) Unreconcile all transactions in the old cash account and any source accounts. (It seems if a transaction is cleared on either the source or destination there's an extra nag prompts to click through). This will move all transactions that are not "Splits". There will be a nag warning about any transactions that are funded by a Split. Just click OK on these and they will remain in the old account for now.
3) For the residual transactions that are funed by Splits, on each remaining transaction in the Old Cash Account register, right click and select "Go to Matching Transfer" or CTRL-Shift-X. This will take us to the source account where the old Cash account was funded by a split. Then just manually change the Category in the Split to fund the New Cash accounts instead of the old ones and --very important-- hit Enter to save. Repeat this by going back into the Old Cash account and repeating for each of the remaining transactions that were funded by Splits.
As a "hint". To make the steps dealing with Splits easier, I named the New Cash account the same as the Old Cash Account except that I added 2 dashes to the end of the name (old -> Cash Account, New ->Cash Account--). That way when I change the split transaction in the Source Account, the new destination of the split is directly under the old destination.
Also, I would occasionally get the question from Quicken "Is this exisiting transaction in account AnyBank Checking the same transaction as the transfer you just entered?" It seems if I select Yes to this question it throws my balances off, so I selected "No."
When done, my balances should be the same now in the new account as the old one was and I can mark the transactions in both Source and New accounts reconciled and delete the Old accounts.