Matching Manually-Added Transactions

occamman

New Quicken user here, so this might be a dumb question. I set up Quicken and downloaded my bank accounts. Somehow, some of the transfer transactions got changed so I deleted them and manually added them back. The new transactions are marked as "uncleared", but when I click on the pencil I'm not shown any matching transactions in the appropriate account. All works fine with matching downloaded transactions. So is there any way to match two manually-entered transactions? Or does it even matter, i.e. is anything wrong with leaving things unmatched?

volvogirl

Huh?  What category is on them?  When you enter a transfer you only need to enter the transaction in one of the accounts.  You enter the other account name for the category in brackets like [Savings Acct].  

Bob_L

Matching merely replaces a manually entered transaction with a cleared one from the bank, to prevent duplication.  If you know that those manual ones have cleared the bank you could go ahead and change their status to cleared now.  Or you can wait until you reconcile where they will show up as uncleared and you can clear them then ( thinking you have not yet used reconcile function yet, CTL-r?). 

Change cleared status by clicking that column in your register.

Chris_QPW

Let's unwind some of what has happened.

Quicken has an option for "Transfer detection".  It is really only a guess.  It looks for a downloaded deposit for a given amount in one account and the a downloaded payment in another account for the same amount.  If it finds this it merges the two transactions into one transfer transaction which are connected between the two accounts.  You can tell it is a transfer if the category is [Other Account], where Other Account is the account the transfer it to.

Being a just a guess means that you should never trust it 100%.
As such you should at least have the "confirm" preference on.
Edit -> Preferences -> Transfer detection:


@volvogirl pointed out what you need to do to make the transaction a transfer (the [Other Account] syntax in the category).

I take bit of exception to what @Bob_L said.  Quicken doesn't "replaces" the manual transaction, it merges the two together.  For instance if the manual entered payee is Bob and and the downloaded one is Deposit, it will use Bob, not Deposit.  The same goes for the category, but there is information like the Downloaded ID that comes from the downloaded transaction (there are various Downloaded fields/columns you can turn on in the register by clicking on the square icon in the upper right of the register.

And as mentioned the cleared status comes from the downloaded transaction, but as @Bob_L pointed out you can set that manually, or if you don't you can actually just select the transaction in the reconcile dialog to set it to cleared and have it be in the reconcile.

Example I purposely set one transaction to uncleared and they started reconcile (Ctrl+R):

Clicking on the Clr box:


All transactions that have already been marked cleared when the reconcile starts will already have the green check mark.