sometimes I accidently accept a checking account transaction which is "new" because it didn't match correctly. now I have the reconciled downloaded entry and the original unreconciled entry.
I'd love to force a match, of course, but its too late.
What are my options?
what i did this time was to delete the downloaded entry (with the warning that i was deleting a reconciled entry) and manually marked the real entry as reconciled. is this safe?
I can't tell you for certain whether it's "safe" or not because I don't reconcile to an "online balance", but to my "paper statement". My guess is there is nothing major to worry about.
But I can tell you what you lose: the "posting date" and the fact that the transaction was, in fact, "downloaded".
Losing the posting date could create problems if you later decided to try to switch to reconciling to a paper statement. Losing the "downloaded" status means that the register transaction will remain a candidate for future "match" (including "Manual Match") attempts.
You can overcome both drawbacks by noting the "posting date" of the downloaded transaction before you delete it, then modifying the remainging transaction to have that posting date.
To view, or modify, the posting date: right-click the transaction; hold down CTRL while left-clicking "Copy Transaction".
When you modify the posting date for the remaining transaction, you should also put a check mark in the "Downloaded" box.
I learned about the hidden "posting" date here, quite a few years ago, from a poster named Bill Pierson (sp?) who, I think, used to work for Checkfree.
I don't recall ever seeing info about the posting date in Quicken Help, but I do think I saw it once in an Intuit kb article ... but I don't recall how I found that article.
I think that an Intuit employee confirmed the basics of the recording/use of the posting date in an Intuit Quicken forums post, quite a while back.
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