Exporting and Importing Investment accounts (Quicken Windows) [EDITED]

r-e-l

Running into issues with moving accounts from personal to Trust (see another thread).

I want to give the file to Quicken or Financial Advisor for them to sort out how to do the transfer.
However, I dont want to give them my entire file as it holds a lot of info I rather not sure with them.

I am hoping there is way to give them a file with only the investment accounts they manage, let them do their magic and at the end, import what they did back to my file.

possible?

jacobs

EDIT: This reply was written when this thread was originally posted under Quicken Mac category. The original poster has now identified they are actually using Quicken Windows, so the technique I posted below for Quicken Mac may or may not be appropriate; hopefully some Quicken windows experts will weigh in.]

Running into issues with moving accounts from personal to Trust (see another thread).

I'm not sure what other thread you're referring to, so I don't know what issue you're trying to solve. Thus my reply below may or may not be fully on point. If you want to post a link to the other thread, or just reply with what you're wanting to do and having trouble with, it may help us offer suggestions. [EDIT: Ah, sorry, just found the other thread.]

I want to give the file to Quicken or Financial Advisor for them to sort out how to do the transfer.

I'll just quickly make clear that Quicken doesn't offer any service where you could send them a data file to work on an issue for you. You can call Quicken Support and have them screen share with you to answer a question or help with resolve a problem, but that would mean allowing the representative to see your data file.

As for giving a file to your financial advisor, the first question is whether they are familiar with/users of Quicken Mac? If not, I doubt a financial advisor would work on your Quicken file for you. I would think most financial advisers probably are not experienced with Quicken Mac, unless they happen to use Quicken Mac personally.

But let me get to the heart of your question: unfortunately, here's no good way in Quicken Mac to separate out one or more accounts into a separate data file and to then be able to re-combine that into your primary data file. There's a convoluted way to create a data file with just the investment accounts you want, and to import it back into your data file, but the problem is that all your transactions transferring funds into or out of these accounts from/to your other accounts will be broken by trying to separate out the accounts.

I'll talk through how you could create a data file with just the investment accounts you desire in case it proves useful…

• Quit Quicken
• In the Finder, make a duplicate of your data file
• Double-click the duplicate file to open it in Quicken
• Delete all the accounts except the ones you want to have in a separate file for your financial adviser: in the left sidebar, Control-click on each account one at a time, and select Delete from the pop up menu
• Now that you have the duplicate file with just the desired investment accounts, select File > Export > Quicken Transfer File (QXF) and export it to your Desktop
• Now do File > New and select Start from scratch
• Select File > Import > Quicken Windows File (QDF, QXF) and point to the exported .qxf file
• Quicken will import the contents of that file, resulting in a file with just the selected investment accounts

You could then give this file t your financial adviser, if they are adept at using Quicken Mac. When they give the data file back to you, you'd do pretty much the same thing in reverse:

• Quit Quicken
• In the Finder, make a duplicate of your primary data file so you can go back to it if there are any problems doing the steps that follow.
• Open your primary data file and delete the investment accounts which are contained in the file from the financial adviser
• Open the data file with the investment accounts from your financial adviser
• Select File > Export > Quicken Transfer File (QXF) and export it to your Desktop
• Now go to File > Open Recent and open your primary data file
• Select File > Import > Quicken Windows File (QDF, QXF) and point to the exported .qxf file
• Quicken will import the contents of that file

Your primary data file will now have all your accounts again.

BUT… as I mentioned at the start, the reason I wouldn't want to do this is that all the linked transactions moving money into and out of the investments accounts you separated and now recombined have been severed. That is, if you have a transaction currently in which you transferred money from your checking account to an investment account, after this process that linked transfer won't exist. Instead, in each account, there will be a generic transfer transaction of money going out or in, but they won't be linked, so tracing the flow of money will be difficult if your account balances aren't completely correct.

So again, I wouldn't recommend doing this because of the potential to make things go from bad to worse. If you have a financial advisor who knows Quicken Mac and who would work on your file for you, I'd think about giving them your data file to make the changes and have them give it back to you, intact. Hopefully, the financial adviser is someone you trust seeing your financial information already, so giving them your whole file might be feasible.

r-e-l

First and foremost .. Thank you. The offer to pass the file was made by the Financial Advisory team. Dont know if they were planning to talk to Quicken experts or not. They asked for the file so I assume they know what they are talking about.

thanks for the detailed steps …

Three questions:
1) In the first step (deleting all the none relevant account and then doing "export") - why do the export? if the file now contains only the relevant account, should I just pass that file?

2) when doing the import … does the import only import transactions or will it also include all the information needed to connect to the new accout i.e .. once the import is done, will doing update will just work or … still need to add the online information?

3) I am trying to understand the warning … so we exported them "old account" … what I was hoping the financial advisor will do is take the file , unlink it to the existing online account, enter the new information and download the new data … kind of "append at the end " … with that done, I will import the "aggregated account of old and new" to the old file (after deleting the old account on the original file) and in theory … wouldn't this work?

btw: not sure if it matters but in this case its a Windows Quicken.

thanks again.

jacobs

The offer to pass the file was made by the Financial Advisory team. Dont know if they were planning to talk to Quicken experts or not.

Who is "Financial Advisory team"? It doesn't sound like a group at Quicken that I've ever heard of. If it's an investment advisor you use for your personal accounts, then I don't know who that is or how they function. I was just noting that most professional investment advisors/financial planners are likely not well versed in the details of Quicken Mac, as most of them likely use Windows computers for other reasons.

1) In the first step (deleting all the none relevant account and then doing "export") - why do the export? if the file now contains only the relevant account, should I just pass that file? 

Good question. The issue is that behind the scenes, every Quicken data file has a unique identifier number which ties it to Quicken's cloud services, so a copy of your primary file has that same identifier. Quicken may warn that one of the files is an older version. If you're sending the file to someone else, I don't know if they will be using your Quicken ID to open the file or if they have their own Quicken ID. To avoid complications, creating a new file not tied to the original file is the safest way to proceed.

2) when doing the import … does the import only import transactions or will it also include all the information needed to connect to the new accout i.e .. once the import is done, will doing update will just work or … still need to add the online information?

No, doing the import in this way will import just the transactions. You would need to set up the account(s) to log into your financial institution(s) — if the person who is going to work on this for you needs to be able to download new transactions.

3) I am trying to understand the warning … so we exported them "old account" … what I was hoping the financial advisor will do is take the file , unlink it to the existing online account, enter the new information and download the new data … kind of "append at the end " … with that done, I will import the "aggregated account of old and new" to the old file (after deleting the old account on the original file) and in theory … wouldn't this work? 

Yes, if I understand you correctly, this is what I was describing. First, get a clean version in a separate file of the accounts you want someone to work on. Let them do whatever they need to do. Delete the accounts from your original file and import the modified accounts that have been worked on. Quicken isn't built with this functionality in mind, but I was describing a way you should be able to do it. My warning was that by deleting and then re-importing these accounts in this way, all transfer links between these accounts would be lost.

btw: not sure if it matters but in this case its a Windows Quicken. 

Ah! You posted this in a Quicken Mac category, and that's why all my comments and suggested path forward are for Quicken Mac. I'm not familiar enough with Quicken Windows file management to know if you'd do it exactly the same way in Quicken Windows.

I will message one of the moderators and request them to move this to a Quicken Windows category, so perhaps some Quicken Windows experts will see this and weigh in. Best wishes!