How do merge duplicate accounts and delete any duplicates within the merged data?

mbienert

I have soooo many duplicate accounts! I need help cleaning up my register.

Jon

I don't know if there's a report you can run, but you can get the Portfolio view to show you that. Click on the Investing group in the sidebar to see a combination of all your investment accounts, and set the Portfolio view to display assets By Security.

Then you can set the date in the date window to whatever date you're interested in, and your holdings as of that date will be listed below. If you have any hidden accounts that were active at that time you'll need to un-hide them to get them included in the portfolio view.

Quicken Jared

mbienert said:

I have soooo many duplicate accounts! I need help cleaning up my register.

Hello @mbienert, 

I am sorry about this issue with duplicate accounts. Thank you for looking to the Quicken Community for assistance.

In order to best assist you, we are going to need some additional information. When did this issue begin? Are or were these accounts connected to online banking services? Were you noticing this issue with more than one financial institution, if so, and which were involved? 

I look forward to seeing your answers.
 
Thank you,

Quicken Jared 

mbienert

I'm not sure when it started but i feel like it was after many major updates. It's with multiple banks. I am sure it is also user error where I imported to the account and created them myself.

Quicken Jared

mbienert said:

I'm not sure when it started but i feel like it was after many major updates. It's with multiple banks. I am sure it is also user error where I imported to the account and created them myself.

Hello @mbienert, 

Thanks for answering my earlier questions about the situation. I am sorry for any confusion and frustration this is causing.

First, save a backup by navigating to the top of the screen and going to File > Save a Backup... and then take a look at the instructions provided in the Support Article linked here.

Additionally, where is your current active data file located? You can check this anytime by going into the same menu mentioned previously and then select Show "(Data File Name Will be Displayed Here)" in Finder... Make sure that the data file is located on your computer and not on an external drive or in any cloud-based storage service.

I hope to hear more from you soon. 

Thank you,

Quicken Jared 

mbienert

Hi Jared, thank you for the article. I don't think it will help me however. My data goes back to 2010 and there are over 20 main accounts, not including the duplicate accounts and duplicate entries in each of the main and duplicate accounts! (If that makes sense) Simply deleting the dupe entries from each register will not help me and would take longer than my years left in life perhaps. I was thinking to merge each duplicate account and then batch delete dupes somehow. My data file is on my desktop and in my adobe docs/creative cloud

Quicken Jared

mbienert said:

Hi Jared, thank you for the article. I don't think it will help me however. My data goes back to 2010 and there are over 20 main accounts, not including the duplicate accounts and duplicate entries in each of the main and duplicate accounts! (If that makes sense) Simply deleting the dupe entries from each register will not help me and would take longer than my years left in life perhaps. I was thinking to merge each duplicate account and then batch delete dupes somehow. My data file is on my desktop and in my adobe docs/creative cloud

Hello @mbienert, 

I am sorry if the article provided earlier was not more helpful. Thank you for clarifying the situation for me.

Be sure to save a backup again, then determine which of your accounts you will be moving forward with. It may be helpful to determine which of your accounts is connected for online banking services by navigating to the Settings menu indicated by the 'gear' icon in the lower right-hand corner of an account and going to the Downloads tab in the window that appears. Whether or not the account is connected, and what Connection Type is being used to link it to your banking institution's online services will be listed here. It may be helpful to use the accounts that are connected to your financial institution from now on and removing the others as duplicates. 

To be clear, you can move multiple transactions at once from one account to another by highlighting the transactions within the register of one account and holding command on the keyboard then clicking on each transaction that you wish to move, avoiding any duplicates. You may then drag and drop the highlighted transactions by clicking on one of them and dragging it to the account you desire in the Account List on the left-hand panel of the Quicken window. 

I hope that is more helpful. 

Thank you,

Quicken Jared 

jacobs

Are these accounts bank/savings/credit card accounts, or are they brokerage/retirement/investment accounts?  If they fail into the banking group, then it's relatively easy to merge data from two accounts: you simply Select All in one account, and drag-and-drop the selected transactions onto the other account in the sidebar.

But as you note, you have duplicate transactions in the accounts, and there's no real shortcut to detecting and deleting duplicate transactions. If you open two accounts in separate window, sorted by date, can you not determine which transactions are duplicate and delete them from one of the accounts? You might find it helpful to select all the transactions in one account, set them to a status of Flag for Review, then merge them; this way you'll be able to easily identify the transactions which came from one account versus the other. Also, in case you're not aware, you can Command-click on as many transactions as you want to select them, then click Delete to delete 2 or 5 or 50 at a time, rather than deleting and confirming each transaction one at a time. Beyond that, there are no "batch delete" shortcuts I can think of.

If that's more work that you want to do, then the only suggestion I can think of is to close and hide the duplicate accounts, so you retain the detail for historical look-ups, and create a new account with whatever transactions you can download from your bank/credit card accounts. 

mbienert

Ahh! Thank you both! All great info and ideas! I think this may be rather time consuming but is doable. Especially if I flag the items before I move them. I love that! And checking to see which accounts are connected is key also! I was merely looking at which ones received new items (blue dot icon) but will check in the info of each account instead. Some of the problem is there are credit accounts, banking and retirement. And there are so many duplicate accounts of each, it was very overwhelming to try and distinguish which ones were actually connected or not. Thank you both again so much for your help! Your ideas will help me solve this problem once and for all for sure.

Last question, I am trying to submit a claim for several securities that were in civil litigation. They’re asking how many shares of each particular stock I had as of such and such a date. How do I determine mass? Is there a report I can run? I tried poking around a little bit but came up with nothing.

Jon

I don't know if there's a report you can run, but you can get the Portfolio view to show you that. Click on the Investing group in the sidebar to see a combination of all your investment accounts, and set the Portfolio view to display assets By Security.

Then you can set the date in the date window to whatever date you're interested in, and your holdings as of that date will be listed below. If you have any hidden accounts that were active at that time you'll need to un-hide them to get them included in the portfolio view.

mbienert

Aha! John, thank you! That works!!!