Quicken 2008 Premier
My goal is to eliminate all categories I am not using.
Is there any way to identify all the categories without any entries short of creating a report on each category?
I attempted to delete the account "_401withdraw" and Quicken blocks me with the message, "You can't delete the investment related category _401Kwithdraw because Investment accounts are present."
There are no 401K withdraws.
So is there any way around this and similar issues?
There are two issues in your post.
"You can't delete the investment related category _401Kwithdraw because Investment accounts are present."
There is no way around that limitation; if you have Quicken investment accounts, you can not delete the Quicken created investment account categories beginning with an underscore.
You may not have any transactions using that category at the moment, but there are situations when Quicken assigns categories and it must have those categories available ... the categories that start with an underscore, are such categories. (Not all the categories starting with an underscore are for investments, but Quicken will tell you if you aren't allowed to delete such a category).
Any category that doesn't start with an underscore should be able to be deleted.
In the Category List, there is a small "report" icon just to the left of the category name; clicking that icon will give you a list of transactions using the category, and if there are no transactions using the category, a popup message will say "You have no transactions that use the selected category".
You might get some benefit from creating an "Itemized Category" report, doing an "Expand All", then Customizing to show "Totals Only" for All Dates. That should give you one line for each category/subcategory that has any transactions.
Thank John _______ Gordon Potter Atlanta, GA
FWIW: As of today, Intuit has acknowledged a bug in the report produced by that small report icon in the Category list.
The bug was reported for the category "_DivInc", but it also happens "_DivIncTaxFree" and "_IntInc" , so I think it's likely related to (at least) all the investment categories beginning with an underscore.
It appears that the report icon will not find any transactions with investment categories beginning with an underscore ... when the transactions occur in an investment account.
It's not pertinent to the subject of this thread, since you can't delete those categories if you have investment accounts, but it certainly is a misleading result.
Should have added that the bug is acknowledged for Q2008.
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