How can I delete all of the "Downloaded Transactions?"

whk

On my last update Quicken loaded over 800 transactions into the "downloaded transactions" section of one of my investment accounts, All of these transactions are duplicates of transactions that are already in the register. Is there any simple way that I can delete all of these downloaded transactions? I really don't want to delete each one of these transactions manually.

splasher

Quicken "remembers" which transactions have been downloaded previously based on the contents of the FITID field of each transaction.  It is almost as if the portion of your data file that retains that memory was corrupted.
I don't have any accounts with the three FIs mentioned, so I can't point a finger in either direction.

splasher

If they are duplicates, is Quicken indicating that they are a "Match"?

If so, I'd make a backup and then do an accept all and see if any numbers changed.  You can always make a copy of the backup, rename the .QDF-backup to .QDF replacing the data file that you did the accept all in and be back to where you were to begin with.

Chris_QPW

Are these transactions in an investment account, or a non-investment account?

whk

Actually Quicken downloaded about 18-24 months of duplicates for 5 different accounts, all were direct connect downloads. Luckily I only had 40-70 duplicates for each of the other 4 accounts and I was able to "accept all" and then delete the duplicates using the "edit multiple transactions" feature in the register. Yes, when I initially accepted the transactions for these other accounts all of the numbers changed. Yes, all of these are investment accounts. In between working with each account, I backed up Quicken in case I couldn't eliminate the duplicates. There were a handful of "matches" and "near matches", but still more than 800 "new".
While I was able to successfully eliminate the duplicates in 4 of these accounts, I really don't want to have to manually mark 877 transactions for deletion.
Splasher, thanks for answering and for the suggestion. Any other ideas?

splasher

Nope, I'm out of ideas.  I've never had to face this issue with an existing account.
I'm curious though, which financial institution was this?

whk

My 800+ transactions are from Vanguard, which happens to just report a lot of transactions. However I also encountered the same problem with accounts from Fidelity and TD Ameritrade. In my opinion this was caused by some type of glitch on Quicken's side. I've used Quicken about as long as you have and have encountered many Quicken glitches in the past, but none as bad as this one. It seems like all of the Direct Connect institutes were impacted by this problems. All of the Express Web Connect institutes worked correctly.

splasher

Quicken "remembers" which transactions have been downloaded previously based on the contents of the FITID field of each transaction.  It is almost as if the portion of your data file that retains that memory was corrupted.
I don't have any accounts with the three FIs mentioned, so I can't point a finger in either direction.

whk

Your corruption idea is worth exploring. My previous thinking was that the newly downloaded transactions were corrupted. However I did run a validate, which did not flag any problems with my data set. I don't know how to access the FITID (for an investment account). Do you know how I can access this?

splasher

You can see what the FI provided in the download looking in the OFXlog (Help->Contact Support->Log files) but that doesn't do any good if you can't see it in the "register" and to be truthful, I've never needed to look, but I can't find a way to show it.

whk

Splasher. Thanks for the hint about corrupted data file. When I ran the "validate" process, the downloaded transaction section was reduced from 800+ transactions to 90 transactions. Evidently the validate process deleted the duplicated transaction from the download transaction section. I was surprised because the validate process took quite a while, and when it was finished there were absolutely no messages about the process. I thought that it just ran without making any changes. However, it did cleanup the downloaded transactions, though at first I didn't even notice the change in number of downloaded transactions.

splasher

90 is still a bunch, but it is manageable compared to 800+.  Quicken may have rebuilt a reference table of the FITIDs or something like that so that the deleted ones were eliminated due to already being in the register like they should have been in the first place.

whk

Actually none of the 90 trans were real duplicates. The standard Vanguard upload is never perfect and each month I have to manually enter a transaction. The trans in the downloaded transactions section went back for about 18 months and it did include those transactions which do not normally get sent over each month. However Vanguard uses 3-4 transactions whereas I consolidate those into 1 each month. So I still had to go through and delete the manually entered transactions within the register. Nevertheless my Quicken is now straight and matches to Vanguard's stats. Thanks for your help. Hopefully I won't have a similar problem the next time I update, but if I do maybe the "validate" will fix everything.

splasher

Glad everything worked out.