Credit card duplicate entries when card renews

broker 21

I'm using Quicken Mac and have for several years. Each time a credit card renews and changes the card account number, Quicken correctly stops adding new transactions to the old card, but rather than starting to post new transactions to the new card on the following day, it adds transactions from the preceding month also, thereby doubling those entries, charges and payments. Is there a way other than manually (and carefully) deleting those duplicated entries from either the old or new card account?

jacobs

Ah, yes, with the added information you provided, there is nothing you can do except delete the duplicate transactions. You may find it helpful to open one account in its own window and one in the main window, so you can view the accounts side-by-side. You might be able to mass delete all the transactions in the new account prior to the date when the changeover occurred, then merge the transactions from the old account into the new one. But you still have to check carefully to make sure you aren't missing any transactions. Or, if the volume of transacitons isn't too huge, just gong through them one at a time shouldn't take too long.

jacobs

I don't know what credit card you're using, but most credit cards renew without changing the card number; only the expiration date and security code change, typically about every 3-4 years.

In any case, there's a relatively easy way to deal with this. Once Quicken creates a new account it is downloading into, click on your old account in the left sidebar, do Edit > Select All so all your existing transacitons are highlighted, and do a click-and-drag to the new account in the left sidebar. This will leave you with all your transactions, old and new, in the new account, and the old account should now be empty of transactions. If Quicken created an opening balance transaction in the new account, you'll need to delete that. Then you can delete the old, empty account.

broker 21

Thanks. The problem still exists that transactions for the previous month downloaded to both the old and new accounts. Doing as you suggest without first deleting any duplicates from one or the other account would still leave those transactions duplicated. BTW, this particular case involved an account with a fraudulent charge, at which time the bank issued a new card with a different number, of course. I guess my only solution is to carefully and one by one, delete the duplicated transactions since, oddly, the sequence of charges is not the same in every account.

jacobs

Ah, yes, with the added information you provided, there is nothing you can do except delete the duplicate transactions. You may find it helpful to open one account in its own window and one in the main window, so you can view the accounts side-by-side. You might be able to mass delete all the transactions in the new account prior to the date when the changeover occurred, then merge the transactions from the old account into the new one. But you still have to check carefully to make sure you aren't missing any transactions. Or, if the volume of transacitons isn't too huge, just gong through them one at a time shouldn't take too long.

Jon

What I would do here instead of creating a new account in Quicken would be to disconnect the existing Quicken account for the old card, then reconnect it to the new card. Unless there’s some reason you wanted to track the old & new cards separately, this would keep everything in one account. The only problem would be if your bank is creating new transaction ids for those old transactions in the new card account; in that case there’s nothing Quicken can do to eliminate the duplicates since they appear to Quicken to be different transactions.