Ping John Pollard, RC White? Year-End Copy in QP2008, Weird Data Left in Pruned File

Hi, Margaret.

I'm sorry about the problem, but I'm not the right guy to ask about it for at least a couple of reasons: First, I've never used Year-End Copy. Second, I've never used Quicken's retirement-account features (401(k),

You DO have at least one recent backup, don't you? Be sure you preserve that, so that if your working copy gets hopelessly confused, you'll have a way to get back on track.

I hope that John or other readers can offer some suggestions.

RC

I'm wondering if hiding an account also means it is not impacted by the year end process... I would try restoring the last backup you have, un-hiding that account and rerunning the year end copy process to see if that helps.

Here is a link to a thread in Intuit's forum - describes a clever method to gain access to the tax impact account:

Appears that once you gain access, you can delete the offending transactions.

Suggest attempting this in a copy of your data file.

Sorry RC, I forgot, you're the Vista guy. ;-) I'm a backup fanatic, having last worked in computer network security/disaster recovery. So I have plenty of copies at every stage of the process.

Thanks and sorry for the bother. :-)

Regards,

Margaret

Thank John. Unfortunately neither of these methods works with QP2008. I guess Intuit locked it up good this time. BTW, the posts are #26 and #28, not #30. :-)

Re #26, When I attempt to create the transfer transaction, Q asks if I want to create a new category. It will not let me make a transfer into the "Tax Impact of 401(k) Accounts." :-(

Re #28, Q will find transactions from this account, but the found transactions have $0 amounts rather than the negative dollar amount transactions I need to clear.

Pooh. But thank you for referring me to that thread. I intended to post my original msg over there to reach a wider audience, but I wasn't sure what subforum to post it in!! I think I will add my experience to that thread and see what develops.

In the meantime, I've switched back to my fileset that still includes all 2004 data. I don't need to purge 2004 immediately.

Thanks and Regards,

Margaret

It's JM you need to thank.

This works. If you get the offer to create a new category, you have not keyed the account name exactly correctly, or have left off the square brackets. [Q2008 Premier, R3]

I was not able to get this to work. I don't think it had anything to do with the amount being zero, it looked to me more like the process was only toggling the "Select" box on and off. The op for this approach was using Q2007; I didn't bother testing in Q2007.

OK, I'm a dunce. The poster for #26 in this thread says to use brackets around the account name. Duh.... I know better about account name brackets. I can gain access to the "Tax Impact" account using this method when I use the [] brackets. Silly me for not thinking clearly. I was too busy following directions to the letter. :-)

Anyway, interestingly enough, this account contains transactions dating back to 1993. (Only one for 1993, and no transactions till 1999, after which there are monthly transactions for each year since.) (I'd been making monthly deposits since 1992!) Also interesting is that the offending transactions for 2004 appear no different than any of the other transactions. By "unhiding" all accounts in Quicken, these other "Tax Impact" transactions do show up in Tax Schedule reports for the corresponding years. I'm beginning to wonder if all the older transactions in this account got left behind accidentally. (I'll also have to do some testing to find out hiding which account(s) make the difference in whether or not these transactions show up in Tax Schedule reports. I'm beginning to think I should leave well enough alone and not risk messing up my data file. (Though I *will* do testing as I have time, since now I'm very curious about this puzzle.) :-)

Anyway, in my test file, I deleted the 2004 transactions, and of course, they no longer appear in my Tax Schedule report. It seems to have no other effect on my test data file. But then again, I haven't spent much time with it. BTW, I'd have to actually delete the transactions, as it's not possible to "clear" them.

Any thoughts on the above info? Anyway, thanks so much for your help. If nothing else, seeing "inside" this file has taught me that I know enough to be dangerous. And this knowledge has made me much less "irked" that the data persists. ;-)

Regards,

Margaret

A thousand pardons, JM. Thank you so much for your help!

Regards,

Margaret

I doubt I can answer all your questions, but maybe I add a little to your store of dangerous knowledge.

I think the transactions you're seeing are created by the Quicken Paycheck Wizard to handle a potential problem with matching employer 401k contributions. Quicken wants a way to prevent the pre-tax 401k contributions from adding to the paycheck gross, so they offset the employer match transfer to the 401k account with the MiscExp transaction in the always hidden, Tax Impact account.

I'm not sure why some of those Tax Impact account transactions get orphaned; when I delete a paycheck transaction with an employer match 401k transaction, its Tax Impact transaction gets deleted.

It's possible that one or more earlier versions of Quicken forgot to delete transactions from the Tax Impact account when paychecks were deleted.

Another possibility is that Quicken might forget the Tax Impact transactions if you deleted an entire account that contained paycheck transactions. [Deleting an account can definitely orphan Scheduled Transactions for the deleted account, so it's not out of the question that it could happen to paycheck transactions in the Tax Impact account.

Heheh! :-)

I think you're right about this one. While doing some chores today, I've been thinking about this and came to the same conclusion.

I think this is what's going on. I have a set of one-year Q fileset archives dating back to 1990. As an experiment, I copied a few of these one-year archives and converted the copies to Q2008 format. In one of the archives, the "Tax Impact" account was missing the lone 1993 transaction. When I saw this, I concluded that all the "Tax Impact" transactions prior to 2004 in my current fileset (2004-2008) are orphans. BTW, this particular archive was in Q2006 format prior to my converting it. When I finally do my "real" YEC and purge 2004 data, I think I'll go ahead and dump the orphaned transactions in the "Tax Impact" account.

Makes sense, but in this case.... I'm still using the same checking account in QP2008 that I originally created using Q for DOS 3.0! (And this account is the only one that ever had any paycheck transactions.)

Anyway, thanks so much for your help. I'm feeling less "dangerous" now. ;-)

Regards,

Margaret

Here's another way, if you have Q2008 (doesn't work in Q2005 - can't speak for Q2006 or Q2007).

With the Tax Schedule report open, hold down CTRL and double-click on a Tax Impact account transaction. [You need to have the Reports only Preference, "QuickZoom to investment forms" turned off.]

Ok: it works in Q2007 as well.

Neat John, I'll stash this away for future reference, too.

Regards,

Margaret