Number of old style Buy/Cash/Transfer investment transactions updated

James L Peterson

When I do a "Validate and Repair File" operation, everything comes out fine, except I continue to get messages about "Number of old style Buy/Cash investment transactions updated: 133/0/0". These happen every time I run Validate (so it apparently is not "updating" anything. So this is annoying. I would like to have a completely clean Validate.

The only thing I can find in the discussion boards is:

"The reference is to this in the Validate & Repair log:

Number of old style Buy/Cash investment transactions updated: 44/0No out-of-range security references found.
And as far as I know Quicken Inc has never explained what this means."

It seems truly useless for Quicken to output a message, repetitively, that no one knows what it means. Can we get an explanation? Or get Quicken to re-program things so that it doesn't say this?

Quicken Anja

Hello @James L Peterson,

Thank you for reaching out to the Community and telling us about your issue, though I apologize that you are experiencing this.

Could you please provide a screenshot of the error you describe receiving?

If needed, please refer to this Community FAQ for instructions on how to attach a screenshot. Alternatively, you can also drag and drop screenshots to your response if you are not given the option to add attachments.

Thank you!

Chris_QPW

Could you please provide a screenshot of the error you describe receiving?

It isn't an error; it is simply a message that people don't understand:

Chris_QPW

P.S. Note that a more general comment might be that messages in the Validate log are pretty obscure for the user. I'm pretty sure no one understands the message above it either.

EDIT: and that it is a bad practice to show/bring up a log file with obscure messages in it even when no error is detected.

travelwhileyoucan

I have a similar questions:

1. What is an old style Buy/Cash/Transfer investment transaction?
2. Why does it indicate that the transactions were updated (11/0/0), but when I run validation twice in a row, the second time is still 11/0/0 when I would have expected them to no longer need to be updated.
3. Is there a way to find and fix old style transactions so that a validation update results are 0/0/0?

Chris_QPW

I doubt that you are going to get any answers from Quicken Inc on this so I will take a whack at this.

As you can see, I have 43 of them in my current data file. In a copy of my data file, I deleted an old brokerage account, and the count didn't change. They I focused on exactly what it said "Buy/Cash/Transfer" and realized that is a BoughtX. So, I deleted an old account the had BoughtX transactions in it, and the count dropped to 29. So, that is the answer to your first question (mostly, doesn't explain "old style").

As an added check I changed a BoughtX in an old account to Bought (cash in the account and sure enough the count went down by one. I changed it back to BoughtX and the count went up again by one.

Next created a new account and entered a BoughtX transaction. Sure enough, the count went up by one.

So, any BoughtX is "old style".

EDIT: didn't explain my guess at #2. It seems that the developers are somehow interested in BoughtX transactions, but not enough to go to the trouble to change them into two separate transactions. Why are they concerned about them? I have no idea. As for "fixing them" the fix would be to stop using BoughtX and use one transaction for the transferring of the cash to the account and another for the buy. But like I said before, this isn't an error so there really isn't anything to "fix".

q_lurker

@Chris_QPW Interesting diagnosis.

I’ll point out also BoughtX, SoldX, DivX, etc are required in Single Mutual Fund accounts since there can be no cash balance. So in that case, there would be no fix. (Assumes your diagnosis applies to those accounts.)

My other thought more broadly is that sometimes these items get into validation reports not as problems but as checkpoints. I believe the security reference was such a case. They found problems with some reference pointer getting out of whack, so the created and reported a check on that. As long as the two are compatible or meet some criterion, no problem. May be the same way with the ‘old style’ data.

Chris_QPW

@q_lurker yes, I agree and that exactly what I meant in my second post. These aren't "problems", they are purely developer "information". Such information has no place in a report that you are going to show to the customer, especially one that comes up even when no errors are detected.

There isn't anything wrong with the "old style" BoughtX. Note that I said that you can put in a BoughtX right now and get the count to go up. Clearly these are still considered OK to use.

I'm not sure about this, but I do have a guess why these messages were recently added. I don't believe that Quicken Mac supports them. As such, they might have decided to "detect them" so that they can change them when converting to QXF format for converting to Quicken Mac.