Importing *QIF files from Money 2002 to Quicken 2005 for Mac - Problem with transfers and categories

Is that a quote? Are you seeing just the account name with an asterisk in front of it? Or just the account name but no asterisk?

In any event, to create a transfer in Quicken, you need the name of the account in the category field ... but you need it enclosed in square brackets, as in: [Joint Account].

I think you change your transactions to do that fairly easily, but from the sounds of things, you may wind up with another problem. If you already have the FROM and the TO half of your transfers in your registers, but they are stand alone transactions and not transfers, then as you modify them to become transfers, I think you will double up the transfers.

For example: If you have a transaction in the Savings Account with a category of "Joint Account" and the other half of the transaction is in the Joint Account with a category of "Savings Account"; when you modify the category of the Savings Account transaction to read "[Joint Account]", you will create a *new* transaction in the Joint Account (Quicken will not attempt to link the newly created transfer with the pre-existing transaction in the Joint Account).

That would make the pre-existing Joint Account transaction redundant ... except if it was also a "reconciled" transaction. If the redundant transaction is not reconciled, you could delete it with no ramification; if it is reconciled, you will lose your reconciled status. I think you can re-reconcile, but it is more work.

I think that once you have modified all the FROM categories to have the TO account in square brackets; you could simplify the process of deleting the redundant transactions using Find/Replace (Edit > Find&Replace > Find/Replace). You could "find" all the transactions with account names in their category field (one find/replace for each account), but with no square brackets enclosing them; then change their payee names to some dummy name guaranteed not to be the same as any other payee name in your file. Then in the registers for each account, sort the register by payee, locate the dummy payee and select all its transactions, then "cut" or "delete" them.