Quicken manual account changed to online and linked to the wrong financial institution.

Amo1

Today I did a One Step Update, and a property and debt manual account (it has never been connected for online services) I have with Chase now says I have transactions to download.  When I looked at the account details it now says that the financial institution is Fidelity (I have several Fidelity Accounts set up for online services).  When I try to deactivate online services for the Chase manual account, I get an error message that I cannot because I have downloaded transactions to accept.  However, there are none.  How can this be fixed?  Thank you!

Frankx

Hi @Amo1

Sorry to have to say this but - when did you last backup your datafile? And, where you you store your Quicken datafile?

What you are describing sounds like your datafile may be corrupted.  If that is the case, the quickest and easiest way to fix it is usually to restore a recent backup.

Get back to me and we'll go from there.

Frankx

Amo1

Thank you @Frankx.  I really appreciate you getting back to me.   I backed up my datafile several times over the last few days.  I went back and restored backups and found when the issue happened.  It definitely happened after I added a Fidelity account (online) on Jan 25.  The issue I have is that I did a ton of work recategorizing, cleaning up and organizing my quicken file, so I would be losing 15+ hours of work if I revert back to the Jan 25 file.   

I read this article and followed the steps:  Quicken Says There Are Transactions to Accept But I Do Not See Any  I then ran a validation and super validation this evening.  They both ran pretty quickly and came back with no errors, but they did not correct the issue.   I keep my Quicken file on my computer hard drive, and do not use Quicken mobile.   

Any help you could provide would be greatly appreciated!

Frankx

Hi again Amo1,

I clearly understand your reluctance to lose the work you've recently done, but I believe that you really need to restore that backup which did not show the data corruption you are seeing.  It is obvious that the file is corrupt, and the only way to solve that problem that I know of is to revert to a good backup file.  Once you do that, make sure that you do a file validation and super validation on the file before you redo the work that you've lost.

I wish I had better news to deliver.  Let me know how this works out for you whether you take my advice or not.

Frankx

Amo1

Thank you @Frankx.  I have never done a data validation before until now.  Wouldn’t that show if my data file is corrupt?  

Over the last 3 days I spent about 15 hours re-categorizing and cleaning up years of data.  I won’t have the time to do that again for a while.  Important to note that this work was done after the issue came up, so I do not believe those changes caused the issue. I just did not notice it until late today, unfortunately.

Is there a way for me to restore the backup from Jan 25, and then somehow recreate the changes I made the last 3 days?

Alternatively, since there appears to be one account with an issue with only about 2 1/2 years of date and less than 40 transactions, could I create a new property and debt account and basically duplicate those entries, and then delete the old account?   

Looking for anything that would save me another 15 hours of work. Thanks!

Amo1

@Chris_QPW and @q_lurker, I noticed you both posted with advice on similar issues.   Since those threads were closed, I could not respond.  Any insight would be greatly appreciated. 

Chris_QPW

Ok, I will give my theory on why this happened, and what I might have done if I was in your situation.
Others have reported similar problems, not usually with manual entry accounts, but with online accounts, but I think it is close enough that it might be the same cause.

When Chase was changing over from Direct Connect to Express Web Connect + I noticed marked difference in the way the conversation happened to what would happen in the past and what I expected.  Usually when changing between connection types like that there would have been many duplicates because the unique Ids for the transactions changed.  For the most part this didn't happen (but for some people it did in strange ways).  That clearly means that Quicken was somehow scanning the transactions and filtering out what it thought were duplicates.

This might not seem related, but the point is that Quicken is now taking an "active role" in this change over and for whatever reason it is also looking to change over all the accounts that it thinks are from the financial institution.  I say this because others have had the financial institution name changed on some of their accounts that aren't with that financial institution during this process.

On to damage control.  Given the above was the cause I would expect that the only real damage to your data file is messing up the online status of that account.

What I would do is use this procedure to move all the transactions in that account to a new account, and then delete the old one.  That is hoping that you can actually delete that old account.
FAQ: How Do I Move Transactions Between Quicken Accounts? — Quicken

Amo1

Thank you @Chris_QPW!  I am not sure what exactly happened, or what caused it, but it definitely was because a Fidelity investment account somehow got linked to a manual Chase liability account and changed the financial institution name.  Since Quicken showed that the Chase account had transactions downloaded (but I could not see them), I could not change the financial institution name.  

Between your suggestion above, and some other posts I read, I was able to fix the issue.  Here is what I did, in case others have similar problems: 

1) I took my latest Quicken data file and made a copy in a new folder.  This then deactivated all of my online financial institution connections, which was important, because I could not do this manually for the account with the issue.

2) I then moved onto your suggestion and created a new liability account for my mortgage.   This was time consuming, since all of the transactions were split and linked to an escrow account so I could not just "copy" or "move" them, and had to go back to the source account and change the split transaction links manually.

3) I then deleted the old Chase account with the issue.  Quicken allowed me to do this since I was still not connected online to any financial institutions.   

4) I then had to reactivate all of my online financial institution links, which also took some time. 

One other note, I did get the error OL-362-A: "Your financial institution has downloaded data for an account that does not exist in your Quicken data file" twice after I did all of my work.   To make this go away I logged out of my Quicken account by going to edit > preferences > Quicken ID & Cloud Accounts and then logging back in.  I then had to restart Quicken, and it worked fine. 

Not how I wanted to spend my Friday and Saturday, but it is fixed.   Hopefully Quicken gets their stuff together soon.  I have been using their software for 20+ years and have had more issues in the last 18 months than in the previous 20 years. Thanks again for getting back to me so quickly. I truly appreciate it.