Add tool to allow users to easily identify and remove duplicate transactions [Edited]

ckauf56

Problem - duplicate credit card transactions occur too often, particularly when you replace an existing credit card with a brand new credit card number, expiration date and security, whether due to the expiration of the existing card or due to it being lost or stolen. Manually reviewing all transactions even using the Downloaded ID can be a very time consuming and inaccurate process, particularly when you have numerous credit cards and have over a 1,000 transactions.

Solution - Quicken needs to develop an internal tool as part of the Quicken Software that will automatically detect duplicate transactions across all types of accounts or by specific account category or by specific account. Then once these duplicates are identified, allow the user to easily delete the duplicates it wants to delete for each duplicate transaction identified.

Jon

The only thing I would take issue with here is the word "automatically". I don't want this running unless I tell it to - 99.99% of the time I won't need it and any "duplicates" it finds will be wrong.

jacobs

You have over 1,000 transactions a month? How often have you had to have your card number replaced?

A new card with a new expiration date and security number shouldn't affect downloads to Quicken. If you have your card stolen or shut off for suspicious activity, in most cases your credit card account is unchanged even though the card number is. But it depends on the credit card company how they handle such a change.

But here's the thing to understand: every transaction downloaded from a bank or credit card company has a unique Financial Institution Transaction ID (FITID) number attached to it. That number is generated by the financial institution, and it should never change. Quicken uses the FITID number — which you can see in the Transaction Inspector window or by making the FITID column visible in your register — to determine what is a duplicate transaction and what is a new one. If your credit card company issues a new credit card and then generates new FITID number of all the old transactions, it shouldn't; the old FITID numbers should remain the same because the transactions in the account haven't changed. If you're getting lots of duplicates after such a change, the fault lies with your credit card company handling the process incorrectly, not with Quicken. Quicken relies on the FITID numbers being unique to each transaction in order to avoid duplicates.

Additionally, a tool to detect duplicates in general would be challenging because lots of transactions appear somewhat similar and it would be hard to algorithmically determine which ones are legitimate duplicates and which aren't. I often have two identical charges to the same credit card on the same day, such as paying something for myself and for my wife. I sometimes have two transactions a day or two apart for the same amount.

I think the better approach here if you get a new credit card number and that has been prone to duplicates in the past, is to first go through and review your existing transactions, changing them al the Reviewed. That removed the blue dot/pencil icons in the status column. Then when you're going to download transactions from the new card, they will all come in with blue dots, making it easy to see which ones are new and which are old, and to delete the duplicates manually. If date order isn't the best, then you can filter the register for the past 3 months and sort it by amount or by category, if that provides an easier way to identify and delete the duplicates. (But as I said above, this shouldn't be an issue unless your financial institution has messed up in assigning FITID numbers to your transactions.)