Best Practices for Manually Entering Transactions So They Match Bank Downloads

rayhunt11105

Hey Community

Please help us figure out a solution and help save my relationship. lol.

We have multiple checking accounts to manage our life. 2x Personal, 2 Joint (to manage 2 households). For each shared bill we transfer our share into the respective joint account.

To understand the flow of cash my partner manually enters into his register an entry when he makes the transaction with the bank. In the (now distant) past when we downloaded bank transactions, Quicken would auto locate the two entries and auto match/merge into one entry keeping the details of the manual transaction, with an occasional not auto matched transaction. When a transaction didn’t auto match/merge the drag and drop method for matching/merging worked and was an easy fix.

The issue now is that none of the above works as it has in the past. We understand the meaning of the status indicators (blue dot, brown pencil, blue pencil).

When we see a blue pencil (matched transaction) our assumption would be that Quicken recognizes the relationship between the downloaded transaction with the manual transaction and should merge the two together. In our experience the manual transaction receives the blue pencil and both transactions stay in the register. We have also found that the drag and drop method does not always work.

Could someone help with best practices so this monthly confusion and frustration can be reduced?
Thanks in advance.

Also can anyone explain when you are linking a transaction to another account why it wipes out the category forcing manual reentry multiple times.

RickO

At first blush, it sounds like there are duplicate transactions. The one with the blue checkmark was automatically matched and the one with the blue dot was a duplicate. Since the manual transaction was already match to one download, it could not be matched again. It is helpful to turn on the Match Status column in the register to see what's going on.

Why would there be duplicates? One possibility is just a problem with the bank transmitting the same info twice with different transaction IDs. You can check this by turning on the FITID column. You may need to unmatch the auto matched transaction (right click, reject auto transaction match) to see the FITID on that one.

Duplicates can also appear when you reset the Quicken Cloud. Have you been asked to reset the cloud? If so, that can happen if you are accessing the file on different computers. Are you doing this?