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Setting up new data file

Hi all,

Sorry if this is an FAQ - I really wasn't sure what to search for.

I have had both my personal and business data in Quickbooks (2 files) but I really don't need the complexity for our personal data and I missed some features of Quicken. So I'm switching back for the personal file.

My problem is this: I transferred all the data from QB to Quicken starting with 12/1/04. I then reconciled the checking account, the most recent statement being 12/16/04 to 1/15/04. I deleted all transactions that were not used during the reconcile and updated the opening balance accordingly. All was good, until I started reconciling credit cards and discovered that in a few cases, I needed a transaction from the previous statement in my checking account (that is, a payment on the credit card). I got everything reconciled but now I have a few unreconciled transactions in my checking account which are going to show up and annoy me every time I reconcile if I don't do something about them.

If I go back and do one more statement's worth of transactions in the checking account, that's going to pick up payments to other credit cards, so I'll have to go back another month for those, and pretty soon in order to have a snapshot that covers the same time range for all accounts I'm going to have to include all 2 years worth of data from the QB file. I really don't want to have to do that.

Is there some solution to this problem that I'm overlooking? I would think this would be a fairly common problem, so maybe I am making this too complicated. I just want to have an accurate file with as little of last year's data in it as possible.

Any suggestions?

thanks,

janine

Reply to
janiner
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Ok, I think I fixed it. It's ugly, but here goes. I moved the opening deposit back to 12/1, which was before the offending payments on 12/3. I increased the value of the initial deposit to offset the payments. I then re-reconciled the account, using the new value of the initial deposit and 12/1 as the starting balance and date. Quicken warned about there being more than a month between the two dates, but it let me do it. I then cleared the extra payments and all was in balance.

Like I said, it's ugly. But the important thing is that there are no stragglers and the account balance is the same as it was in Quickbooks, which is slightly important.

If there is a better way to handle this I'd still like to know.

thanks,

janine

Reply to
janiner

If you have already agreed that there is a point in time, before which you do not care about the accuracy of your data, then I see nothing wrong with your approach. You do need to remember what that point in time is, so that when you run reports, you do not think of data prior to that point as having any useful meaning. For example; when you run reports with a date range of "earliest to date", you will likely be picking up some of those transactions that you entered only to get balances correct.

Reply to
John Pollard

Hmm, yes, good point. But is there any other way to do this? If not, then I guess I'll live with it as-is. It's not a huge problem for me; I don't run many reponrts in our personal data. It would be a much bigger deal if it was the business data.

janine

Reply to
janiner

I think just about everyone has the same "problem"; we all had a financial life before we had Quicken, and either we do not have records back that far and/or we don't care about things back that far. The only data that I bothered to try to guarantee was totally historically correct was investment data for securities. For everything else, I just picked a convenient starting date and I don't look at data prior to that.

Reply to
John Pollard

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