Account changes and unable to link accounts correctly

WR10

Long story short, my bank changed my account numbers. I have posted this question before about restoring from backup and such.

The trouble that I'm having now is that when I take the steps to reconfigure with the new account information, I log in and try to establish new accounts. I am then given the options to "Link to existing", but when I try and select the correct accounts to link, the correct accounts are not present. I've tried to find what to do, but I can't seem to find the right verbiage for an effective search.

Please help.

[Deleted User]

@WR10 - you need to first make sure to deactivate online services for all your accounts at the bank.  Then go into the General tab for each account and clear out the financial institution name, account number, and any other online information.  Once this is done for all your accounts at the bank, you can go back into any one of the accounts and resetup online services.  Enter your bank name and sign in with your username and password.  You should be then presented with a list of all your accounts at the bank to link with your existing accounts on Quicken.

WR10

Thanks, Damian. I've tried these steps several times. The issue comes in when I try to reactivate online services with my institution. At that time, Quicken doesn't provide me with the correct accounts as options to "link to existing". Additionally, I have yet to find a way to undo the link process when two accounts are incorrectly linked.

[Deleted User]

When you say "two accounts are incorrectly linked" what does that exactly mean?  I want to make sure I am understanding the situation correctly.

When you don't see your account on Quicken to match to, that usually means Quicken thinks it's already connected.

One thing to try is a validate or super validate.  Sometimes Quicken gets "confused" and needs the validate to undo things.  Please do a backup before you do the validate.

Validate: 

1. File

2. Validate and Repair File...

3. Validate File

4. Click OK

5. Close the Data Log

6. Close Quicken (leave it closed for at least 5 secs)

7. Reopen Quicken and see if the issue persists.

If the issue persists, proceed to Super Validate. If the issue is resolved after performing validation, then please disregard the instructions to Super Validate.

Super Validate:

1. File

2. Hold CTRL + Shift and click Validate and Repair File...

3. Super Validate File

4. Click OK

5. Close the Data Log

6. Close Quicken (leave it closed for at least 5 secs)

7. Reopen Quicken and see if the issue persists.

WR10

First and foremost, thank you for your continued help. I am pretty darn frustrated with the current state of my stuff.

When I talk about incorrectly linked accounts, I mean accounts that I had linked together previously that ended up being incorrect pairings once the process was complete. For exampe, my wife's checking account to mine.

I have tried the validate steps above and they yielded no issues. Now I am trying to get the balance info correct(wildy different from stated balances) and get accounts named and allocated correctly. My vehicle loan wasn't loading as a loan, nor am I able to change it to one as of yet. Nor any of the "link to asset" options.

[Deleted User]

@WR10 - it sounds like your initial issue was a mismatch of online services between your accounts at your financial institutions and your accounts on Quicken.  Even though you have fixed, or are fixing the online services mismatch issue, some transactions may have been downloaded to the wrong accounts.

Are there still accounts that are linked improperly?  Do you remember when this initial mapping of online services occurred?  There are several ways can fix your issues and the answer to these questions will give us a starting point.

WR10

Yes, the accounts are still mismatched. I have been unable to sort it out for multiple reasons, largely due to the fact that certain accounts are labeled incorrectly as checking or savings instead of as a loan. I have yet to find a way to undo or adjust this as it seems to be driven from the info given by the financial institution. The troubling thing is that it wasn't that way during the initial setup of my original account. I can trace it back to initial setup in October of last year.

UKR

If you're talking about a LOC or HELOC account: they can only be supported as Credit Card accounts, due to their revolving nature (you take some money out, you pay it back, you take more money out, lather, rinse, repeat)

If the account is a mortgage: Don't attempt to download information for the loan account. Maintain the account as offline (manual) loan account and set up the scheduled reminder in the checking account to transfer principal and any additional principal to the loan account register, to correctly reduce your loan balance with each payment.

As to the cross-linked accounts: Once you have deactivated both your and your wife's checking accounts, you should be able to relink them, provided you can correctly identify the downloaded account name and associate it with either your or your wife's account register (e.g., bank name "1234-0" is your account, "5678-0" is your wife's account.)

Reactivating accounts typically downloads transactions from the bank for the last 60 - 90 days, over and over again every time you reactivate again. So you got a mess of transactions to clean up. Recommend you compare your registers to the printed bank statements, remove all duplicates and clear up any other discrepancies all the way back in time until your register balance matches the bank statement balance again.

WR10

Not LOC/HELOC, so no issue there.

Mortgage isn’t a problem as it is with the same single-source vendor.

Re: cross-linked accounts: Unfortunately, the way they are depicted from the bank, I am unable to sort out as I am only able to see “Savings XXXXX”. Literally, with the Xs instead of the full account number. So with multiple savings accounts and checking accounts, it is a “Best guess” type situation and I’ve hit it wrong every time thus far. Also, when I am able to identify the correct account and try to “link to existing”, it doesn’t show the account I want to link it to! It isn’t always that way, but for a good ⅓ of my accounts, this happens when I try to link. I end up just creating a new account but I don’t know what to do from there as far as merging goes.

I haven’t even thought about the cleanup yet since so much is amiss, but that is a great idea.

Everything was just fine until my bank changed my account number… :s

Thank you so much for your help.

UKR

Some banks, on their website, allow you to set up account nicknames or edit the account names.
I would give that a try or, failing that, talk to the bank and tell them about sending more meaningful unique names for each account.

WR10

I tried to amend the accounts through my bank and was able to do so. The only problem remains the mismatch and the inability to link the correct accounts together.