Advice needed- debugging corruption in Quicken file

Whether a download will include an 8 month old transaction is partly dependent on how long your financial institution makes transactions available for downloading. But I think it should be a moot point.

But once you download a transaction, Quicken should prevent that specific transaction from downloading again ... even if your financial institution still has the transaction available for download (assuming you are trying to download to the same Quicken account in the same Quicken file). Deleting the transaction from your Quicken account should have no bearing on this; once the transaction is downloaded - even if you don't "Accept" it, or you delete it after accepting it - it should never download again.

Since you are talking about one transaction, you should be able to use your printed statements (or get the appropriate statement(s) from Vanguard's web site) to determine whether that transaction was a legitimate Vanguard transaction, and if so, what its specifics were ... so you can enter it manually.

I think you should backup before taking any steps to "fix" the problem.

John,

I have been able to get Quicken to re-download transactions by disabling the account from online updates and then reenabling it. It does have the potential for downloading an awful lot more than you want, and some of my transactions didn't make complete sense initially (could be because I was changing brokers at the time) , depending on how old the account is, but at least you have the historical transactions to look at.

jo

Yes, that is one way; normally much derided (because of all those unwanted transactions) by those who are usually doing the deactivating/reactivating to try to regain communications with the financial institution. You can also achieve similar results by deleting the .QEL file from your Quicken fileset (though it's a bit more draconian than deactivating/reactivating) ... good for when you can't deactivate.

But it's significant overkill to try to recover one transaction.

If you just want to look at all the transactions available at the financial institution for download, you could create a temporary New Quicken file with just the one account and download to that file ... easy to get rid of those transactions. Or, I suppose, backup, deactivate/activate, download, peruse ... then restore the backup.

I certainly wouldn't want to do it often, believe me. And you're absolutely right that for one transaction, it is overkill. I'm still cleaning up my files. There are downloaded transactions that make no sense.. or else they didn't get recorded properly the first time. It's back to the paper statements time.

Currently Smith Barney has a bad bug that is inhibiting downloading if you have any security that for a any amount of time has a 0 quantity. (probably before settlement). They are not fighting over the responsibility for this, but thought they had fixed it. I sold some securities so they should not show up at all in the online account screen showing positions, but they do, and with a 0 quantity. Hence, nothing else can be downloaded, or rather no transactions can. The new securities that I *purchased* are downloaded in a form that makes Quicken realize they are new and ask you what to do with them, but the buy transaction never makes it, nor do any other transactions that have nothing to do with the the 0 quantity ones. It's quite a mess right now.