Recurring issue with Quicken deleting two investment register transactions. Why?

Jim Hamren

I have this issue that Quicken apparently spontaneously deletes two investment register transactions where I close out an old account. When this happens the account shows up with a positive balance rather than zero. It happens 3 - 4 times per year, and I cannot work out if there is something specific that triggers it. Does anyone have any ideas? I have Quicken Premier for Windows and it is always kept current.

Jim_Harman

Are you closing 3-4 accounts per year (that sounds high) or are you saying that it happens 3-4 times per year on one closed account, deleting two transactions in that account?

Is the account really closed in Quicken, with a red circle-slash icon, or is it an unused account that should have a zero balance?

Jim Hamren

One account “closed” 10 years ago. But in your terminology an unused account with a zero balance.

q_lurker

I have had an intermittent problem where a transfer between accounts occasionally lost one half of the transfer.  I eventually found that it related to editing what would seem to be an unrelated transaction. 

Specifically, I had copied one repetitive expense at $0.01 as a monthly series in a certain investment account.  When I would later edit the amount for the current month to the correct amount, a transaction from month's earlier that moved money into that account from another account would get lost from the other (sending) account.  That otherwise unused sending account would suddenly have a positive balance. 

Once I deleted those copied $0.01 transactions and set up those planned transactions some other way, the problem has not recurred.  Something in copying and then editing those transactions had apparently gotten buggered up with the other transaction.

I've had other circumstance where editing an investment transaction has had unexplained consequences, so you might see if you can associate your spontaneous deletions to some transaction edits you make.

Good Luck.

Jim Hamren

q_lurker - You are on point in that one of the two transactions that gets deleted is a transfer to another account and only the outbound part is cancelled, the inbound part is not. You are also on point in that it always happens when I am “editing” the register. I put that in quotes because the way I enter data is to copy a prior transaction for the given security and then modify the date and other info. This saves having to scroll through a list of securities to get the right one. But I am never near the closed account or the inbound side of the transaction that gets deleted. IMHO Quicken has a bug that their team should address and fix.

q_lurker

I agree there is a bug somewhere, but getting to the reproducible part is really tough.  I'd be working along and happen to notice the inactive account suddenly had money in it.  Then it always seemed to be the same amount related to the same missing transfers.  Eventually, I made the connection tp my edits on the other transactions.

I was editing MiscExp transactoins if that makes any difference (no security involved. 

Other than copying a different transaction, I can't offer any specific positive advice.    

   

mshiggins

@Jim Hamren what sort of investment transactions are you copying and pasting?

Jim Hamren

mshiggins - dividends typically

mshiggins

Have you considered using income reminders or memorized investment transactions to enter your dividends instead of copying and pasting?

There are advantages to using either of these approaches. 

The income reminders enable income forecasting and tax impact forecasting and ensures you don't miss any dividends you are expecting. 

The memorized investment transactions can be linked to a scheduled transaction group which enables automatically entering multiple investment transactions at the same time. 

Jim Hamren

mshiggins - I have not up to now. I will take a look. I hope they will not add additional keystrokes. Thanks for the suggestion.

Jim Hamren

It just happened again, while using memorized transactions. Neither the memorized transactions or accounts being updated were related to where the deletion takes place. Extremely frustrating.

q_lurker

Odd.  It just happened to me again as well.  Still trying to get a handle on this.  

Jim Hamren

I can’t be 100% sure, but I am pretty sure the last two times were actually the result of downloading transactions. I have just 1 account where I do this and the deleted transactions in the unrelated old account were replaced by 2 of the downloaded transactions.

mshiggins

Some questions:
1) Are you automatically accepting downloaded transactions in your investment transaction lists (account register)?
2) Is Schwab one of the financial institutions you download from?
3) Is cloud sync enabled for the data file?

Jim Hamren

The answer to all 3 questions is, I think, no. I accept the downloaded transactions after the download. I am downloading from Fidelity. And I do not sync to the cloud as far as I am aware.

q_lurker

Jim Hamren said:

I can’t be 100% sure, but I am pretty sure the last two times were actually the result of downloading transactions. I have just 1 account where I do this and the deleted transactions in the unrelated old account were replaced by 2 of the downloaded transactions.

In my case, downloading of transactions for these accounts is not applicable.  
@mshiggins No cloud sync either.