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Move Transactions doesn't handle "other account" side of transfer correctly.

Chris_QPW

Here is the starting condition of three accounts.

Note that there is an attachment on one transaction in the checking account and one in the cash account (different transfer transactions). The operation is to move all the transactions in the cash account to the savings account. These are all transfers because from what I can see regular transactions work fine, so they will not be tested here.

First prompt.

This prompt is correct, because they are warning the user, they are moving one or more reconciled transactions. Note that they should only prompt once for this no matter how many transactions are moved, and that is the case.

Next prompt:

This is a problem! Why is it asking to delete something? And you will notice that it is a Reconciled transaction. What it is asking about is the "other side" of the transfer, the one in the checking account. You will notice that there are two reconciled transfer transactions in the checking account. This is the first one. I feel that this is wrong because the user has already been warned above, but for sure they should only be warned one time per move.

Next prompt:

Asked for the next reconciled transaction in the checking account. If there were a hundred reconciled transfer transactions, you would get asked this question a hundred times. The is just not what any user would want to happen!

But it gets even worse.

Here is state of registers after the move.

These two are fine, even the attachment was moved fine, and the reconcile statuses are correct.

All the Reconcile/clear statuses have been removed! And it isn't really obvious, but the attachment has been removed too. Those "delete warnings" where exactly that, they deleted the transaction, and let the moving of the transfer in the cash account recreate the transfer in the checking account. Whereas I can see that might be the "underline" operations done, a move shouldn't change the CLR column status, and the attachments shouldn't be removed. Someway must be worked out to preserve this information.

Also, I want to point out that selecting cancel on the Delete prompt is probably going to surprise the user, it certainly did me.

Reset the accounts to their starting condition and do the move again, but this time select cancel on the first Reconcile prompt. Nothing happens. This what is expected. The move is aborted because the user decided they didn't want to move any reconciled transactions.

Start again, this time saying OK to the prompt about moving a reconciled transaction, but select cancel for the deletes:

As you can see, getting prompted for the delete on both of the reconciled transaction in the checking account.

The result:

The delete/moves aren't done.

Conclusion. When a transfer is moved from one account to another the "other side" shouldn't be affected at except that the "to" account changes to the one where the transaction was move to.

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Comments

Chris_QPW

Also, I would like to point out, that you shouldn't send a GUI programmer to do a Database programmer's job.

Moving transactions between two account for the most part should be a database move. Instead, this has been implemented at the top GUI level. You hear every single transaction being moved one at a time. This is a VERY inefficient way of doing this.

UKR

Hmmm … I have always recommended to NOT perform a Move Transactions with Reconciled Transactions.
Instead, my advice is to

mark them all and change them from Reconciled to cleared or uncleared
mark them again and move the transactions
in the destination account register mark these transactions and change them back to Reconciled

Perhaps it might be better if programmers
either changed the Move transactions procedure to categorically refuse moving reconciled transactions
and/or prompted for "move reconciled …" only once and terminated the entire procedure upon receiving a Cancel reply.

There's got to be a better way to do this …

Chris_QPW

@UKR I'm afraid that advice doesn't work either, well unless you feel like changing the reconcile status in multiple accounts and you know which ones they are.

In the past when you did a move it would ask about every single reconciled transaction, and as such since that wasn't viable when you are moving a lot of reconciled transactions people came up with two schemes, they one you are suggesting, and the Copy and they delete method.

Currently they changed the Move command not to prompt on every reconciled transaction (but only in the register you are in).

Both in the past and now if you have lots of transfers that are reconciled on in the other accounts Quicken will ask you about every single one of those. So, for the "change reconcile" and move to work, you would have to first identify all account that this account has a transfer to and change the reconcile status in those accounts. That really isn't viable.

The copy and then delete method isn't perfect either since it doesn't copy attachments. But at least it does the copy at the database level. The copy takes a second, the paste takes a second, the delete of the account a few seconds.

The move operation is "per transaction" and stops for any reconciled transaction (other account).

And you hear the "entered transaction sound" for every single transaction that is moved.