What would cause Quicken to change some reconciled transactions?

Question

I have a brokerage account, MS, and a CC account AmEx.  For years we've made electronic payments from the MS account to the CC account.  It has worked correctly and both accounts were reconciled and balanced as of 2/28/23.  When I went to balance on 3/31/23 both accounts' starting balances didn't match the prior month ending balance.  I tracked it down to all the electronic payments in the AmEx account from 6/21 to 3/23 had been changed by Quicken.  Instead of being from MS to AmEx they all showed from AmEx to AmEx and the corresponding payment entries in the MS account were gone.  All electronic payments in both account before 6/21 are still correct.  File validation didn't find or correct anything.

Quicken Kristina · Answer

Thank you for your reply,

If this was a one time occurrence and you've already put in the work to correct the issue, there may not be any value in troubleshooting it further.  It is uncommon, but sometimes when an account is disconnected and reconnected, information coming in from the financial institution can change existing transactions.

If you do want to continue troubleshooting, the next step, since you've already tried validating your file, would be to restore a backup from before the issue started.  Then test in the newly restored file to see if the issue happens again.

Thank you.

rpoole · Answer

The only thing out of the ordinary that could have occurred between reconciling on 3/31 vs 2/28 would be the AmEx account had to be reconnected due to security enhancements.  Looking at the date it started changing transactions, 5/21, there is no noticeable difference in the payments between the two accounts before and after that date.

All data is on a separate internal HDD than the C: drive.  No data is sync'ed to any internet sources.

The transactions for both the MS and AmEx accounts are downloaded each month.  Since there is only one AmEx account Quicken can correctly set the category on the downloaded transaction to in the MS account to [AmEx} thus correctly making the payment to the AmEx account.

When Quicken changed things it not only changed the entries in the AmEx account so instead of coming from the [MS] account they were from the [AmEx] account and it removed the corresponding entries from the MS account.  To fix it I changed the [AmEx] category in the effected transactions in the AmEx account to [MS] and it recreated the deleted payment transactions in the MS account although they are now Xout vs Withdraw as all prior uneffected transactions and Quicken won't change it to Withdraw no matter what I do.

Quicken Kristina · Answer

Hello @rpoole,

Thank you for reaching out to the Community and telling us about this issue.  I'm sorry to hear you're running into this problem.  Was there anything that happened prior to this issue starting, such as having to reconnect accounts?  Do you keep your Quicken file on your C drive or is it on a shared network drive?  Is your Quicken file synced with any cloud service, such as One Drive or Dropbox (if it is, you will usually see the service name listed in the file location)?  The simplest way to check your file location, if you have Quicken up and the file open, is to click on File, then look near the bottom of the list, just above where it says Exit.  It will list the file locations for the 4 Quicken files you have most recently accessed, with the one you are currently in at the #1 spot.

Thank you.