Lost CC payments

bdegarmo53

When I logged onto Quicken this morning, I was greeted with a message saying I had to reauthorize my Discover account's Internet access. I did so easily but then discovered (no pun intended) that by doing so, Quicken had deleted the earliest 2 years worth of payments in my registry, amounting to tens of thousands of dollars no longer being reflected in my registry. Instead of a balance of several hundred dollars, my registry shows my balance as being tens of thousands. Of course, the lost years are 2005-2006, so I no longer have paper receipts to use to be able to correct this. I can't simply delete all of the charges for those years because I have nothing to use to reset a starting balance. I have records/receipts going back 10 years and could, I guess, delete everything in the registry prior to that, but there's historical data in there that I'm hesitant to delete (like when a major appliance was purchased). The payments were made using a checking account we closed 4+ years ago, so that account is closed in Quicken as well now and the payment data is not accessible.

Is there a way to recapture this lost data?

UKR

Take a look in your Checking account register, to see if the matching transfer transaction somehow became unlinked and show something other than a transfer to Discover card.
Or could it be that the reauthorize process downloaded a whole bunch of duplicate transactions? Those should be fairly easy to identify and delete.

bdegarmo53

Thanks for replying. As I stated in my OP, I can't look in my checking account register because the lost transactions are from a now-closed checking account that Quicken no longer lets me open. And there are no duplicate transactions.

UKR

Unless something is seriously wrong with your Quicken data file, an account register marked closed in Quicken still has all its transactions and you can still look at the register and add, change or delete transactions.

Usually the old account register can be found either in the Account Bar, with a red Ø "no" icon next to it, or if hidden, when you click on the "More Accounts" entry at the bottom of each section in the Account Bar.

Based on what you're telling me, something must have gone seriously wrong during making changes to the Discover account. To get things back to working order, it might be better if you restored your Quicken data file from a backup taken prior to making the Discover changes.

https://www.quicken.com/support/how-backup-or-restore-your-quicken-data

bdegarmo53

Thanks again for your suggestions.

Re: closed account, you're correct. I was able to open it to look at the registry. I was under the impression that I couldn't, but I was wrong. Anyway, in doing so, I came to realize that it would take me hours to review all of the entries and add those that were missing, with no assurance that ALL of the missing data could be restored. Yes, I could add all of the missing payment transactions, but without the paper CC statements I couldn't be assured that all of the charges were there. I could spend hours and still end up with a faulty balance.

I considered restoring a backup, but wondered if I would again have to reauthorize the Discover account and find myself back in the same situation. I still have my monthly backups should I need them.

In the end, I decided to use the paper statements that I've kept for tax reasons to go back 7 years and establish what my balance was at the beginning of 2015 and use that as an opening balance for the account. Thus, I deleted 10 years of Discover data (2005-2014), data that I realized I no longer needed after having reviewed it for major purchases. Besides restoring my correct balance, I've greatly reduced the size of the data file, and it took me less than 20 minutes instead of hours.

While I've corrected my problem, I still have to wonder of there's a bug in Quicken that caused the data corruption when I reauthorized the Discover card access.