Changing Financial Institutions and worried that I will duplicate all of my transactions when downlo

Docbh

Quicken for Mac Classic Premier Version 9.2.2 (Build 902.61860.100)

I am switching my investment accounts from Merrill Lynch, from which I have 18 years of data, to Morgan Stanley, and I can map the Morgan Stanley new account number to the accounts that I currently track and download into the existing Quicken files.

Morgan Stanley will have all the transactions that occurred prior to being their customer.

I fear Quicken will pick up all of those transactions now coming from Morgan Stanley with the dates transacted and cost basis, etc., which Quicken will see as new transactions and download them into the mapped files which already have downloaded from Merrill Lynch and reconciled those transactions, duplicating hundreds if not thousands of transactions.

Is there a way to select a start date to only download new transactions later than the date I switched over?

Or does anyone have a better suggestion?

[Edited - Readability]

Quicken Kristina

Hello @Docbh,

Thank you for reaching out! Unfortunately, there isn't any way to 100% guarantee there will be no duplicates of existing transactions.

When you change from Merrill Lynch to Morgan Stanley, do you plan to keep the account linked to the existing account in Quicken, or do you plan to mark the existing one as closed and add the account as a new account?

Before following the steps below, please backup your Quicken file. For instructions on how to do that, please see this article: https://www.quicken.com/support/how-backup-or-restore-your-quicken-data#section-windows-2 [Edit - Added]

If you are adding it as a new account, Quicken will download all the transactions that the financial institution makes available, which may result in duplicate transactions if the new financial institution makes the historical data available. There isn't an option to download as of a set date. However, you can mark the old account as separate to prevent the transactions in that old account from affecting net worth and reports. For information about marking an account separate, please review this help article: https://info.quicken.com/mac/hide-separate-close-or-delete-accounts#Separate-an-account

If you link to the existing account, there is still a risk of duplicate transactions, since the different financial institution may format the data differently, which will make it harder for Quicken to know whether a transaction is already in your register. You may have an option to limit the starting date for downloaded transactions if you're linking to the existing account. To check if it's an option, click on the account to select it, then go to Accounts>Settings… and look for the Transaction Downloads section on the Downloads tab.

If the financial institution offers Web Connect/QFX files, that may give you the most control over the date range that gets imported, since you may be able to select the date range you want when downloading the file from the financial institution website. Warning: This doesn't completely prevent duplicate transactions, and if you change to a different connection type, there's a risk duplicate transactions will download when you change the connection type.

I hope this helps!