Cleaning Up Categories in Q2006

Is "Transfers and Payments" the name, or is it just "Transfers"?

Not sure what the problem is, but there might be some corruption.

If Quicken thinks that any other categories besides "account categories" (your Quicken accounts, in square brackets) are "Transfers", then something is certainly wrong.

Did you make a backup before starting your project to delete catagories? If so, you might make a Windows copy of that backup fileset and open it to see if there were mis-identified categories before you started your project.

You could try exiting Quicken and restarting to see if that gets the categories correctly "sequenced".

You could try making a Quicken "Copy" of your current data (the data that has had some categories deleted/merged), Validating that Copy, then opening the Validated Copy to see if the problem remains.

If the Validated Copy does not exhibit the odd behavior, make that your regular data file; if the Validated Copy still has the problem, you can just discard it. And if Validating a Copy of your Quicken data doesn't solve the problem, I'm not sure what else you can do.

[If "Transfer and Payments" is a Quicken category, you could try deleting it. You could also try deleting the category just before and/or just after that. The theory being, perhaps there is corruption in the Category List.]

You can use "Recategorize" or "Find/Replace" to "merge" categories, albeit, one at a time. But that shouldn't do anything to correct Quicken's mis-treatment of some categories as "transfers". Or to resequence your Category List.

I should have said to backup before doing any of the above.

Validation didn't indicate any problems found and didn't fix the problem.

In the complete catgeory list, There are 3 major groupings titled in bold print for which "hide" is not an option, and edit, delete and merge cannot be done.

They are Income, Expenses and Transfers and Payments. Transfer and Payments has a line following it which is [Deposit Acct] in which the transactions are listed - an internal transfer from the deposit account to the checking account. I do not know whence this Transfers and Payment grouping came - the original file was imported from Q99 a while back and probably 2 people prior to me were operating this program.

I did find by experimenting that deleteing the item just before Transfers and Payments just moves the problem to the new immediately prior entry. That is, the transactions for Transfers and Payments is listed both under that item and whatever category proceeds it.

I did neglect to mention in the original post, that this is actually a religious organization account but as far as day to day operations the standard Q99 and 2006 work just fine (with the glitch noted above).

Also...at the time of original import there may have been some validation error message but I am not sure. But that was some time ago.

Further suggestions?

Perhaps if there is nothing else to be done, I will archive the data at the end of this year. Then...would it be possible to mass delete the entire category list and begin anew?

TIA Jim

I don't have Q2006, and when I replied originally, I was looking in Q2008 ... when I looked in Q2007 this morning, I could see the "old" way of presenting categories in the Category List, so I now see "Transfers and Payments".

So, for background:

"Transfers and Payments" is just a "heading" and should be followed by the names of every one of your Quicken accounts ... in square brackets ... and the last "category" listed should be the last "account" in your Quicken file.

Those "account categories" have always been a part of Quicken, they are legitimate "categories, and they are what you use to "transfer" funds between two Quicken accounts.

If you have a non-"account category" (a category that is not the name of a Quicken account in square brackets) mixed in with your actual "account categories", there is certainly some kind of corruption.

[Quicken will not allow you to create a main category that has the same name as an existing Quicken account ... but Quicken will allow you to create a subcategory with the same name as an existing Quicken account.]

I'm a bit confused by this. There can't be any transactions categorized to "Transfers and Payments": that's not a category, just a heading in the Category List. Maybe you could provide an example.

So the data in the Quicken file you are having problems with all came from the "import" of a QIF file?

You could try deleting the "Deposit" account to see if it is causing the Category List problem?

Backup first.

If your categories are truly hosed, then you can delete them all and "start over", but that could be a very large job. Deleting the categories will also cause all your transactions to become uncategorized ... making it that much more difficult to re-categorize them (though not impossible, especially with the assistance of Find/Replace).

I should have clarified this: I mean to delete the account from the Account List (you can't delete it from the Category List). That deletes the account and all its transactions.

If you really need the transactions in that account, you can try exporting the transactions to a QIF file, to be imported when you re-create the account. [Importing QIF files to Q versions later than Q2004 is a bit more complicated than doing it in older versions ... but possible.]

I tried deleting the deposit account, but not category. (Working on an older backup file). I now have just one account "J-- checking account" and the corruption point in the category list has now moved to the point where "J-- checking account" lists out aphabetically. The bold headiing "Transfers and Payments" now appears directly above "J-- checking account" and nothing below that, which is expense categories beginning with K is accessible for merger or deletion, although I can assign any category to a transaction, including those beyond J-- checking.

Sounds corrupted beyond repair to me?

If I recreate the account and import the transactions, what happens to the categories associated with the transactions? If the categories no longer exist will they just be uncategorized?

I am leaning toward simply creating a new file,imporing no transactions and using the 12/31/2008 balance as the starting balance, keeping the old file available to run reports from 2008 and earlier years. My Q2006 12/31/2008 balance will include some uncleared transctions, and I can see some issues with reconciling to the bank statement if the transactions are not in the file, but then I guess I can just work around with balance adjustment(s) if required and hopefully it would settle down after a a couple months. Does that sound right?

TIA Jim

I tried deleting the deposit account, but not category. (Working on an older backup file). I now have just one account "J-- checking account" and the corruption point in the category list has now moved to the point where "J-- checking account" lists out aphabetically. The bold headiing "Transfers and Payments" now appears directly above "J-- checking account" and nothing below that, which is expense categories beginning with K is accessible for merger or deletion, although I can assign any category to a transaction, including those beyond J-- checking.

Sounds corrupted beyond repair to me?

If I recreate the account and import the transactions, what happens to the categories associated with the transactions? If the categories no longer exist will they just be uncategorized?

I am leaning toward simply creating a new file,imporing no transactions and using the 12/31/2008 balance as the starting balance, keeping the old file available to run reports from 2008 and earlier years. My Q2006 12/31/2008 balance will include some uncleared transctions, and I can see some issues with reconciling to the bank statement if the transactions are not in the file, but then I guess I can just work around with balance adjustment(s) if required and hopefully it would settle down after a a couple months. Does that sound right?

TIA Jim

You could export the Category List to a QIF file and open that file in Notepad to see if any sort of corruption shows up.

No, Quicken will ask you if you want to create a new category for each transaction that contains a category not already in the Category List.

If the exported QIF file of categories from above doesn't have any corruption (or you remove the corruption), you could import that QIF file into your New Quicken file before you import the QIF file of transactions ... then your Category List would have all the categories that would be in the QIF file of transactions.

You could certainly take that approach, though I personally would do everything I could to get all my data into one Quicken file. I think that is doable in your case.

How would one do that? Q2006 says it cannot be done. Any references available?

Looking at the category list in the QIF file I do not see any sign of the corrupt entry ie [deposit account] that shows up in the middle of the list of expense categories when I try to manipulate categories within the program. Could something possibly be corrupted in the Quicken operating files?

I'm not really surprised.

Sure, and it might not be being exported to the QIF file.

As I suggested later, import the QIF file of categories into a New Quicken file to see if the problem still exists.

[The restrictions on importing QIF files in later versions of Quicken ONLY apply to "transactions" in certain account types. There's no restriction at all on importing things like Quicken Lists.]