Is there a way to mass update all my Investment Transactions from BoughtX to Bought?

f_stopblues
f_stopblues Member ✭✭
in Investing (Windows)
I have over 1000 transactions in a 401k account which were originally classified as BoughtX when I initially downloaded the data to the account. I am no longer able to re-download the data, since the data is from a very old 401k account. Am I able to update all of the transactions from BoughtX to Bought, instead of manually updating each one?

Answers

  • Rocket J Squirrel
    Rocket J Squirrel SuperUser ✭✭✭✭✭
    No. Within Quicken, you'd have to edit each transaction.
    The only way I know to do a bulk edit would be to export the account transactions to a QIF file and do a global text find & replace of BuyX with Buy. Not sure whether you'd also need to delete the "L" lines which indicate the transfer account. Then import the QIF file into a new account and delete the old account.
    Yes, it's a lot of steps, but less than 1000.

    Quicken user since version 2 for DOS, now using QWin Biz & Personal Subscription (US) on Win10 Pro.

  • Chris_QPW
    Chris_QPW Member ✭✭✭✭
    I was thinking about suggesting the exporting/deleting/importing but I got worried about the ramifications, and as such didn't go ahead and suggest it at first.

    For starters all of those BoughtX are connected to transfers from other accounts.  Even if I go in and edit them, one has to wonder what is happening in the other account and if that is desirable.  And if one is doing this in bulk through an export/import of QIF files that means in between the export and the import one has to delete all the BoughtX transactions in the register, which may result is [Unspecified Account] in accounts where that transfer was from.

    There is one exception that I can think of that this would work OK for and that is if the BoughtX is actually for the 401K account that it is in.  I do know that in very special cases the 401K accounts can get setup where the funding doesn't come from another account, and they use a BoughtX with the same 401K account as the transfer account to just change the cash balance.  If this is the case, it might work fine.

    I do have a better way to do the export/import than exporting a QIF, change it (in a text editor), and import it (after deleting the existing transactions.

    If you bring up an Investment Transaction report and customize it for only the transactions, you need to replace you can export that to an Excel spreadsheet file.  From there you can use my program ImportQIF to generate a QIF file to import the transactions back into Quicken.  Since there isn't any standard on the "action terms" my program asks how to map the actions in input data to the ones you need, so you can easily map a BoughtX to just a Buy (which in my program is just Buy without putting in the default transfer account).  Note QIF files go by the security name, not the symbol.

    You can get ImportQIF (which is free) at: http://www.quicknperlwiz.com/
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