Best way to synch up account timeframes

Flotzam

I am new to Quicken, still at the stage of creating accounts, downloading data and checking to make sure all the ending balances are making sense.

At my broker, I have a checking account and a primary brokerage account.

When I noticed the Quicken checking account was created with 90 days of history, I manually downloaded more history one quarter at a time because I wanted to analyze my spending for 2022 vs 2023.

My main brokerage account at this point only has 90 days of history.

I have transfers from my checking account to the brokerage account that are showing up as un-categorized expenses and they occur more than 90 days ago, so there is no corresponding transaction in my brokerage account to match them to.

Should I start downloading older brokerage account transactions one quarter at a time to make the two accounts history timeframes match? I am a little worried that doing that may also mess up the brokerage account data because I see quicken has created a couple of manual transactions to set the starting balance so that it matches the on-line balance. If I download transactions that pre-date the manual baseline-setting that Quicken did, do I need to delete those and create my own to set the initial balance, or will Quicken re-set them?

If I decide I don't want to download the brokerage history, is there a way I can modify the orphan-transfers so they don't get categorized as expenses?

I honestly don't recall what happened with the checking account when I downloaded old history, I had a ton of manual patching up to do making credit card payments all synch up between accounts and I don't remember if I deleted and re-added initial balance numbers there or not.

Quicken Kristina

Hello @Flotzam,

To answer your question, the best course of action depends on your preferences. If you need the extra history in the checking account, but not in the brokerage, then you would want to edit those transfers in the checking account. You would need to change the category so that, instead of showing as a transfer, it shows as something else, such as Cash & ATM (if no default category fits, you can create a custom category). Once you save the change, you should get a message like the sample image below.

If you click the Yes button, it will delete the transaction from the investment account and save the change to the category you made in the checking account.

If you want the extra history in the brokerage account, then you would want to pull that information in so that the timeframe matches up with the checking account. You may need to delete or edit the manual transactions Quicken created (They're called Placeholders, since they are transactions Quicken creates to account for missing history when you first add the account as an online account.) since they do not automatically change when you pull in more history. You would also want to check to make sure the transfers don't get duplicated. They shouldn't, but if something keeps Quicken from recognizing the transaction is already in the register, they might get duplicated. If that happens, you'd just need to delete the extra transactions.

I hope this helps!