Copying transactions between investment accounts

Sure it can. You just have to do it one transaction at a time.

Have you now decided that "incompatibilities" are not a problem?

If so, revert to the backup from before your recent download, Activate the old account for transaction download, and download again.

Or cut/paste the downloaded transactions into the old account, delete the new account, and activate the old account for transaction download.

Or export the new account to qif, then import to the old account. (Yes, it can be done; I believe I have already posted the technique in this group ... relatively recently).

How about:

1) Backup your current Q data file, 2) Disable download on your NEW account 3) Delete the NEW account 4) Enable download on the OLD Fidelity account 5) Download into the Old account 6) You'll probably have to do some deleting of newly downloaded transactions 7) If you don't like what you see, revert to the backup created in step

2. db

This suggestion was excellent, with a caveat. The procedure went like this:

When I realized I could not copy transactions (even single ones - as per my answer to JP), it did occur to me that those newly downloaded transactions, dating back 3 months, would still be available if I tried to download them again. This is an iffy business, however. Chase credit card, for example, downloads many past transactions (direct), but seems to know which subset to submit for your acceptance or not. My bank account, on the other hand, via webconnect, seems to download only transactions since the previous download, except for once every few months, when it downloads dozens of transactions, not recognizing them as matches, either.

So I de-actived downloads on the new account, then attempted to activate them for the old account. This terminated with an error - 'try again later.' So then I tried to re-activate for the new account and got an error 'could not complete'. At that point I sent my query to the newsgroup.

I figured I would have to wait a day, or wait a business day, or perhaps even make a call to Fidelity. What actually happened was that by Sunday morning, the download activation had succeeded on the old account, apparently without any further action on my part. Then I downloaded the transactions, which were indeed available. A few of them were found to be 'Near Matches' with some of my by-hand entries (even though they had dates different by ten days), which made me nervous, because I didn't know if they would be included when I 'accepted all.' But they WERE, and everything was fine.

Thanks, Dan.

-- jim

danbrown wrote:

Many thanks for all your good suggestions, John. Re-downloading to the old account worked great (see my answer to DB).

Here are some brief resp>>copying transactions between accounts cannot be done

I tried harder, since I believe you, but I ended up not figuring it out. I can 'copy' when I choose a transaction, but when I go to the other account 'paste' is greyed out, both by right click in the register and by clicking Edit. This is Q2005P.

Yes. Sorry to have been so vague. I have had some unpleasant experiences when downloading transactions to an account where I have made by-hand entries before. I have had quicken not recognize the securities as being the same ones, and not querying, instead simply entering them as new securities, and I have also had inconsistent matching - some correct and some incorrect. In this particular case, quicken explicitly asked about two of the securities, and correctly identified the third. It oddly identified three transactions as 'Near matches,' even though their dates were ten days different from their 'near matches,' but they were accepted just fine.

The only remaining 'incompatibility,' which isn't serious, is that the downloaded transactions are recorded as being paid for from the account rather than from its cash balance. Since my paycheck is set up to contribute to the account's cash balance, I have always paid for the securities using the cash balance. Presumably I will have to correct all the downloaded transactions by hand in the future, or remove my paycheck contribution to the cash balance. It was nice to have the latter when I entered the securities transactions by hand every few months, since my net worth stayed approximately correct. Now that one-step update will update the securities transactions every day, I'll consider removing those contributions to the cash balance.

This worked great, with one day delay, as per my answer to DB.

Would have also been very little work, except that I couldn't figure out how to cut/paste.

I actually used this for peace of mind - exporting the old account to qif before I downloaded the new transactions into it, just in case of trouble.

Thanks a million, Jim

I'm not sure I can explain this; I have Q2005 Deluxe (but that should not cause the difference), R3 (which might be the difference).

I do notice that there are some restrictions on pasting into investment accounts: I couldn't paste a check transaction from a non-tax deferred account to a tax deferred account, nor to a Single Mutual Fund account. But I could copy/paste a Shares Added transaction from a non-tax deferred account to a tax deferred account. And when I tried to paste the same transaction into a Single Mutual Fund account, the paste process was permitted, but the security name was automatically changed to the correct security for the SMF account. Perhaps there are other restrictions that I am too lazy to discover at the moment.

I noticed in your reply to Dan that you were doing "Accept All"; personally, I never use Accept All ... at least not until I have processed all the "Match" and "Near Match" transactions individually.

A "Near Match" transaction, unlike a "Match" transaction, will modify the transaction already in the register; that's ok if you have verified before you accept, but could create problems otherwise. (I only get a few Near Match transactions, but I have yet to get one that I wanted to modify my existing transaction - I usually delete the downloaded transaction and re-enter manually as needed, though you can make the downloaded transaction new if you change the date of the register transaction to the future).

I should have mentioned that this case was from one 401k account to another. Not having it in front of me right now, I am not sure which release i have.

whoa. I better go back and make sure it did what I thought it did. I should have checked more carefully which existing transaction it thought was a near match.