Categories showing that I didn't have before

Question

There are numerous categories showing up that I didn't have before and that I have not added. Some of these added categories have unusual descriptions. For example, the category "Not Sure" has a description of "Acme Pharmacy". Seems Quicken has been polluting data. I have read elsewhere that this could be due to Quicken Mobile & Web Sync, but I have this turned off and always have had it off. I've hidden the new categories and am now deleting them. I'll watch to see if they show up again, perhaps after the next update.

I am certain that this did not come from my data. Has anyone else seen this?

Gregg107 · Answer

I cleaned up the foreign categories (deleted them). All had zero transactions. Did validate and supervalidate and file has been clean for days. While investigating I noticed a category "ACCT_f5a" at the top of the list with zero transactions. Using search with "any field" found 22514 transactions with this (I have over 56k transactions in this file). However, searching on specific fields like category, payee, tag and memo all show not found for this text ("ACCT_f5a"). I've deleted it and done validate and supervalidate with no issues.

Perusing the transactions found with this text, it appears on transactions seemingly each day every month (but not ALL transactions for a given day) going back to 2000, the start of this QDF. This text appears to be from an earlier bug (see:

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7939772/category-list-anomalies

This text is being added on new downloaded transactions so it appears that the bug fix did not clean up all the data fallout it caused as it appears this text is stuck somewhere in the OSU process that writes transactions to the file.

Gregg107 · Answer

By "not my data" I meant that this is not data that I ever entered or imported, but yes, it is in my QDF file so in that sense it is mine. I guess I should have said this isn't data that I have ever entered or imported.

Yes, some of the categories had subcategories and a few had tax settings. None of the categories had any transactions. Validate fixed one error but did not show any other issues. Supervalidate found no issies. I've deleted most of these but left a few alone to aid investigation. I'll monitor and post updates as available.

NotACPA · Answer

I just checked my Cat List and didn't  see a "Not  Sure", even  when  I displayed Hidden Categories.

So, tell us a bit more about it.   Is it recorded as an Income/Expense/Transfer?  Is it a parent category, or a sub-cat of something?

If you use the "Search  Transactions" box on  the very top  line of an account to search for Acme,  does it find anything?

Have you tried taking a backup and then  Validating your Q data  file?

And, disagreeing with your last sentence … it IS in your data, otherwise you wouldn't be seeing it in you Cat List, which is part of your data.  HOW, WHAT and WHY are the questions.