Fixing balance problems.
I am a new user. Month One went perfect. Imported from Credit card and three bank accounts. All Good. Love it.
Month Two and the wheels are completely off. Everything I try makes it worse.
The Issue: We have three bank accounts. Every month two savings accounts make an auto transfer to the checking account. Month Two quicken imports correctly notes the transfer in the checking, but does not debit the savings accounts, so their balances are too high. I think I made a wrong choice during import.
I try various ways to manually fix the line items, but no luck. I delete them and try to reimport. That does not work.
Finally I delete the data for the month to start over. Now imports run fine, but no data is reimported.
I suspect the transactions I deleted are still marked as having been imported already, somewhere.
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks!
Answers
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You are correct in your suspicions. Each downloaded transaction has an ID associated with it so that Quicken "knows" not to import it again. To import transactions again you have to restore to a backup that doesn't have those transactions in them.
I'd advise you to not rely on "imports" to somehow have Quicken do your accounting for you. You will have the most chance of success by entering transactions manually and having the downloads confirm your manual entries by Matching them. The mindset should be that Quicken helps you do your accounting. That approach is especially relevant to transfers because Quicken has to "guess" what the other side of a particular entry goes, and it sometimes guesses incorrectly.
Having said that I'll admit that you really can't make all entries manually when they actually occur because some transactions, particularly transactions in investment Accounts, aren't known by you until they do occur. One thing Quicken offers that does reduce the load on you in so far as making manual entries is using Reminders to actually make entries than regularly occur. This tool will make those auto transfers entries for you on the appropriate date and amount.
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Your suspicion is correct, your Quicken file does keep track of which transactions have already been downloaded. If you want to re-download transactions that have been deleted, there are a couple of tricks.
- You can restore a backup from before the transactions were downloaded which resets the Quicken file's "memory" of already downloaded transactions.
- You can download transactions from the financial institution's website (aka Web Connect or QFX) if available.To prevent issues going forward, I recommend you create reminders to enter your savings to checking transfers and Enter those reminders into their account registers before you download the transfer transactions. The downloaded transactions will then Match the already entered transactions instead of disappearing.
Also, you may want to set your download transaction preference to turn off auto adding downloaded transactions to account registers. This will allow you to review each downloaded transaction before Accepting it into the register. This gives you a chance to "train" Quicken on your payees and categories so that transactions come in with consistent payee names and categories.
Quicken user since Q1999. Currently using QW2017.
Questions? Check out the Quicken Windows FAQ list0 -
@Tom Young Jinx!
Quicken user since Q1999. Currently using QW2017.
Questions? Check out the Quicken Windows FAQ list0 -
Thanks to Tom Young and MS Higgens for the solution.
Restoring the backup file got me out of the hole that I dug and I was able to get the imports to work. I only lost that bit of catagorization work that I had completed.
I have a lot to learn about manually adding transactions. I will play around on copies.
The moral of the story is to keep my backups current.
Thanks for helping a rank beginner!
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