Quicken Classic Business Migration from Windows

insomniac

I recently attempted a migration from Quicken Classic Business for Windows to Mac. First off, great job on attempting this massive migration. I don't think it's ready for me to use yet, as there are a decent number of features I miss having on the Windows variant (and some bugs with the migration that screwed up the totals). That said, one thing I noticed that you might be able to fix easily; is when I download my transactions (specifically for my AMEX account). On the windows version it always adds the last four of card number used to the memo. On the mac version it's coming through as blank. I need to know this as I use business transactions on one card and personal on another (but they are the same amex account).

Chris_QPW

I think that is more of a case of what the "aggregation" is providing. Quicken Mac (or Windows for that matter) doesn't decide what goes into the memo field. It is what is provided by the financial institution through a given aggregation. Quicken Connect is "like" Express Web Connect but isn't exactly the same.

jacobs

@insomniac Just to clarify, did you lose the 4 digits in the memo field during the conversion from Quicken Windows to Quicken Mac, or are you not getting the four digits in the memo field on newly-downloaded transactions.

If it's the latter there's a way to see if this is a Quicken problem or a problem with the data coming from Amex. Log onto the Amex website, click on Transactions, click Download, and select to download for Quicken. This should result in an "activity.qfx" file downloading to your Desktop of Downloads folder. Do not double-click it, which will launch Quicken to import it; instead open it in TextEdit. (If you have TextEdit in your dock, just drag the QFX file over TextEdit.) Now you can see the raw transaction information coming from the financial institution. In my download from Amex, there are no Returns to separate the data, but you can still parse it out.

Look for the start of a transaction, which is denoted as <STMTTRAN>. Here, I added some line returns to separate the different fields to make it more readable, and I edited my identifiable information, so you can see what each transaction looks like:

<STMTTRN>
<TRNTYPE>DEBIT</TRNTYPE>
<DTPOSTED>20231209000000.000[-7:MST]</DTPOSTED>
<TRNAMT>-38.96</TRNAMT>
<FITID>320233440012253069</FITID>
<REFNUM>320233440012253069</REFNUM>
<NAME>MERCHANT NAME WAS HERE</NAME>
<MEMO>MY NAME ON THE CARD-12345-9876543 MERCHANT PHONE NUMBER AND ADDRESS</MEMO>
</STMTTRN>

This OFX code is actually pretty readable…

• TRNTYPE: the transaction type, in this case a debit
• DTPOSTED: the date and time of when the transaction was posted
• TRNAMT: the transaction amount
• FITID: the "Financial Institution Transaction Identification" number, a number generated by each financial institution which is unique for each transaction, so Quicken doesn't import the same transaction more than once.
• REFNUM: a Reference Number, which for Amex appears to just be a repeat of the same FITID number.
• NAME: The Payee name, which may also include the store number or address or other identifying information; Quicken tries to strip out all the other things and leave just the actual merchant name as the Quicken Payee field.
• MEMO: The Memo sent by the financial institution, which can be nothing or can contain a lot of information.

Looking at the downloaded Memo field from my transaction above, the "12345" in the Memo line was the last 5 digits of my credit card number — what you're looking for to differentiate your business card from your personal card. So this shows that Amex is sending that data. And it means that either Intuit or Quicken need to have code written to parse the Memo that Amex is sending and capture what is relevant — the last 4 or 5 digits of the card number — from the middle of that text string to put it into the Quicken Memo field. And for me, as for you, that isn't happening in Quicken Mac. I don't know whether Intuit or Quicken is responsible for this, but I would think it would need to be part of the code Quicken uses to do the import (possibly at the server level rather than in the actual Quicken Mac code).

Unfortunately, getting this resolved feels like a bit of a long shot. You'll need to contact Quicken Support by phone, explain the issue, and ask them to do a screen share. You'll want to show them your old transactions from Quicken Windows where the data was moved into the Memo field, a recent transaction imported directly in Quicken Mac where there is nothing in the Memo field, and the OFX text showing that the last 5 digits of the card number is included in the Memo field sent from Amex. If you're fortunate to have a Support representative who understands all this, hopefully they could document this and have it escalated for a possible fix in the future. I just don't know if Quicken will care or act that they've apparently got some Memo parsing code for Quicken Windows which doesn't exist for Quicken Mac.

Chris_QPW

I really should have asked this before posting my reply. If the connection type is Direct Connect, then the data should be identical, but if they are Quicken Connect/Express Web Connect potentially they might be different.

insomniac

The migration of the memo/notes field worked fine. And I was able to manually resolve the transaction/migration issues (mostly buggy around very old prior scheduled transactions).

Anyways, the answer to my question ended up being very simple. I found it by turning on the "Transaction Inspector." Once I did that I was able to see the memo field I was looking for is called Statement Memo in Quicken for Mac. Once I figured that out; I was able to turn that on in my register and now I can easily see which card was used for each transaction.

jacobs

@insomniac I'm glad you found that; I should have suggested making that column visible, although I thought you wanted to see the card number in the Memo column as you apparently did in Quicken Windows. I'm glad using the Statement Memo field meets your needs.