Conversion issue with Categories

caveman

Having used Quicken for Mac since the 1990s and working with Q2007 for the past 15 years, I finally made the plunge to upgrade to the current version. I read all the past articles, rebuilt indexes and headers, Saved a Copy from Q2007, and got the conversion to work in the new version of Quicken. The problem is that all of my historical transactions have the wrong categories. It looks like random categories were assigned to each transaction. Is this expected and just the cost of upgrading from such an older version, or is there a way to fix this to ensure the conversion preserves the categories?

The categories I used in Q2007 all are listed within my new Quicken category list (in addition to all the new Quicken categories). If I can't fix it as part of the conversion, is there a function in the new Quicken that allows global find and replace of categories across all transactions?

jacobs

I also have not seen this either in my own experience moving from Quicken 2007 nor in reports on this forum from the many users who made the same migration. As RickO posted, reindexing the transaction indexes in Quicken 2007 usually cleans up/prevents any problems like this, but it sounds like you already did it. Out of curiosity, did you check back through your Quicken 2007 file after reindexing to see if the categories were still correct? (That is, it's possible Quicken 2007 created the problem rather than the conversion. Unlikely, but anything is possible.) But I would definitely take a second shot at re-converting your Quicken 2007 data file to see whether it does the same thing or converts more cleanly. 

Adding to what Rick wrote above, one tool you might find useful is the ability to Merge categories or subcategories. You could merge one of the converted categories with one of Quicken's default categories, and this change will be reflected in every transaction which uses the older category.

But re-reading was you wrote, it sounds like you can't do a global find and replace, or rename a category, or merge categories, because you're saying the categories are randomly assigned. 

caveman

Thanks for the great feedback. I did check the original 2007 file and the categories are still correct after the index rebuild. I decided to try the Save A Copy process again to start a new conversion, and this time I see a message which I think I received last time during the Save a Copy process:

An error occurred copying some Online Banking information. This will not affect any of your transactions but may affect your User Profile information.

Followed by another message:

Can't add Statement, it already exists.

Any idea if these messages are causing the conversion problem with my categories, and how to resolve it? I have already rebuilt the index and headers multiple times.

Thank you,
Scott

caveman

Sorry, I neglected to enter another error message received during the Save a Copy process:

Unable to erase partly-copied files.

I am running both the source data file and the Save A Copy file to a USB disk to avoid the Mac file system issues I read about. Any ideas how to work through this issues so I can get a clean copy to use for the conversion?

caveman

Good news - I solved this issue. I tried many combinations of drives - finally moved the 2007 data file from my old Mac to a separate folder on the hard drive that wasn't connected to iCloud, and ran the Save a Copy to the same folder. Then copied that Save a Copy file to the USB drive and moved it over the new Mac, ran the conversion, and all the categories are there correctly. Thanks to everyone for the assistance!

jacobs

Glad to hear you got it resolved! (I was concerned when I read about the USB drive, because if that wasn't formatted as an HFS+ or APFS drive, that might damage the internal file permissions. Going forward, if you ever need to move your data file, you should use File > Compress in the Finder to make a .zip file which is safe to move.)