Fixing balance problems.

Question

I am a new user. Month One went perfect. Imported from Credit card and three bank accounts. All Good. Love it.

Month Two and the wheels are completely off. Everything I try makes it worse.

The Issue: We have three bank accounts. Every month two savings accounts make an auto transfer to the checking account. Month Two quicken imports correctly notes the transfer in the checking, but does not debit the savings accounts, so their balances are too high. I think I made a wrong choice during import.

I try various ways to manually fix the line items, but no luck. I delete them and try to reimport. That does not work.

Finally I delete the data for the month to start over. Now imports run fine, but no data is reimported.

I suspect the transactions I deleted are still marked as having been imported already, somewhere.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Wc1500 · Answer

Thanks to Tom Young and MS Higgens for the solution.

Restoring the backup file got me out of the hole that I dug and I was able to get the imports to work. I only lost that bit of catagorization work that I had completed.

I have a lot to learn about manually adding transactions. I will play around on copies.

The moral of the story is to keep my backups current.

Thanks for helping a rank beginner!

mshiggins · Answer

@Tom Young Jinx!

mshiggins · Answer

Your suspicion is correct, your Quicken file does keep track of which transactions have already been downloaded. If you want to re-download transactions that have been deleted, there are a couple of tricks.

- You can restore a backup from before the transactions were downloaded which resets the Quicken file's "memory" of already downloaded transactions.

- You can download transactions from the financial institution's website (aka Web Connect or QFX) if available.

To prevent issues going forward, I recommend you create reminders to enter your savings to checking transfers and Enter those reminders into their account registers before you download the transfer  transactions. The downloaded transactions will then Match the already entered transactions instead of disappearing.

Also, you may want to set your download transaction preference to turn off auto adding downloaded transactions to account registers. This will allow you to review each downloaded transaction before Accepting it into the register. This gives you a chance to "train" Quicken on your payees and categories so that transactions come in with consistent payee names and categories.