Are my accounts linked?

lgolden

All of a sudden as of August 21 a post in one investment account is showing up in another hidden investment account. Does anyone know what is going on?
Thank you.

Tom Young

What's the financial institution involved here and what is listed as the downloading method for the "old" Account (assumed not to be receiving downloads) and the new Account (assumed to be the Account receiving downloads)?

Also, what release of Quicken are you using?

lgolden

Quicken Premier Windows 10 Enterprise Version R43.20 build 27.1.43.20

I am a pretty basic user and don't know a lot about the program.

So, this is my situation. I do not download data from any institutions. The only downloading I do is to update stock prices. I have several investment accounts. Every month when I get my statement I manually update holdings in my investment accounts. I do the same with my checking account. I have been doing this for many years. So, this means that every month I check the holdings in my accounts against the statements from the financial institution to ensure everything is accurate.

A couple of days ago I noticed money showing in a hidden account. Turns out that a manual entry I made in August in an unrelated investment account also posted to this old hidden investment account. I went back to a backup from August 21 that was on my PC. This backup did not show the erroneous entry. I made this my current file. Then I made a few entries to make the accounts current. When I reentered the transaction in question it again posted to the hidden account.

Quicken claims I am the only person who has called to ask about this type of issue. To me it is a quirk in the system. But as I said I don't know much about the program. Don't know if this long explanation makes any sense to you. Thank you for asking.

Tom Young

What exactly WAS that transaction (details, please)?  Was it an entry that was contained entirely in the Account, e.g., the recording of a dividend where the Investment Account does hold cash, or an entry that also affected another Account, e.g., a DivX? 

The long and the short of your problem seems to be that one particular entry made in one particular Account somehow creates(?) another Account, an Account that's hidden, with the exact same entry, and you can reproduce the error.  Accurate summary?

From the sounds of it that entry somehow seems to be introducing some data corruption.  That would be more logical than a "quirk in the system", which I'm reading as "a quirk in the program."

One thing you might try here is to go back to that backup and open it, and before making any entries in the file do a Copy and Validate procedure as explained here: https://www.quicken.com/support/advanced-data-file-troubleshooting-correct-problems-quicken-windows

and see if Quicken catches and fixes any problems in the file.

I guess my thinking is that sometimes data corruption creeps into a file unnoticed but the corruption accumulates until with one final entry - the tipping point - you DO notice it.  If Quicken does catch something in the backup up, and fixes it, then maybe you'll be able to make that "triggering" entry without a problem.

lgolden

Thanks Tom. I think it is data corruption. I don't know how that happens. I deleted that entry entirely (it was a monthly update that showed increase in an annuity value). I used the same entry each month and just updated it. So, I deleted it completely and made a new transaction. This did not appear in the hidden account. So I am thinking data corruption.
How do I avid data corruption in the future or can I?

Tom Young

Corruption can be caused by many things I suppose, including stray cosmic rays, power spikes and so forth and you really can't control that.  I would guess that sometime corruption is caused by users who maybe reach over and shut down their PCs before Quicken has fully tucked itself away on your hard drive, or if the data file is somewhere "in the cloud" instead of on your hard drive.  Avoid making those mistakes.

I'd also suggest using Quicken frequently enough that you're likely to discover some problem like data corruption early on, without having to somehow reconstruct a month's worth (or more) of transactions.  Along those lines I'd suggest having Quicken make a backup each time you close the program, and setting up Quicken to prompt for "manual" backups, stored someplace else than your hard drive after every few closes.

lgolden

:D Thanks Tom. I do a backup to the PC every time I use Quicken and I have it set to save 10. I also back up my PC nightly to an external hard drive so I am covered on that front. I use it pretty often (at least once a week - I do log in more frequently when the stock market goes up not down) and did catch this somewhat quickly. Wasn’t difficult to catch up this time. A learning experience.