Validation errors: what to do?

Why (specifically) did you do the Validate?

Why do you think there is anything you should now do?

Thanks for replying John. Happy 4th of July.

1. I download transactions once a month, usually on the 1st of the new month. Over the past couple of months I started having trouble downloading transactions from a certain broker - which I assumed was just their servers being overloaded because other financial institutions (credit cards, etc.) downloaded fine. Quicken would stay stuck at "Sending instructions to financial institutions" and then give up saying it had trouble connecting with them. This was only with this one institution. I even called their support and they insisted there was nothing wrong with their servers. Finally, usually the next working day, Quicken would download from that institution.

1. When after many attempts they finally downloaded from that broker I would get 3-4 popups saying saying something about "excessive 1000:1 splits" - all in 2-3 accounts from that broker. I searched for such splits but found nothing.

2. then 2 days ago, again it would not download from that FI. After finally downloading from that broker, on 2 accounts from that broker, Quicken would not let me accept some downloaded transactions. When I clicked on the downloaded transactions in these accounts, nothing would happen and the transactions would not even appear in the register where I could accept or edit them. Accepting transactions in all other accounts went normally. I found that if I closed and reopened Quicken I could sometimes accept a transaction but then again I could not. Only in those 2-3 accounts.

That is when I got really worried. So I made a new backup and validated. On previous validations (in the past), the validations would go through with no popup saying I should look at the log - which I interpreted as meaning the validation found no errors. This time (yesterday) it told me to look at the log. When I did I saw it had all these "backfill" errors which I did not know what to make of and assume are errors the validation found. They are a long list and all are backfills.

So I stopped doing anything else and sent out my message for help.

Thanks for responding.

Jeff

Wanted to add some more information.

I just reopened Q and found that I had finally succeeded in accepting all the downloaded transactions. Being frazelled at the problems I was having I forgot that after one of the Quicken restarts I must have been able to finally accept the problem transactions.

The encrypted partition where I had the Quicken data file was running out of space. I've since made more space. Maybe that was part of the problem.

The quicken data file was very fragmented and I have defragmented that partition. After backups to an external backup drive.

Sometimes doing an "Update now" from the one account that has problems in One Step Update will get the account downloaded.

Another possible workaround is to deactivate the account for downloading, then reactivate it. Since this may not solve the problem and it may download a bunch of already downloaded transactions, backup first so you can revert to the backup, if you don't like the results.

I don't think I've ever seen, or heard of, that before.

So your share balances are all correct. And you know of no real-world splits that occured for your holdings? When you look in your Quicken problem account and the Security Detail view for the securities in the problem account, you see no stock splits?

I'm not sure what the Validate message about the backfill transactions means.

Backfill cash transactions usually occur when you have a placeholder in an investment account with a linked checking account, and you enter a transaction (such as a Buy, Sell, Div, etc*) that would normally affect the cash in the account and the transaction is controlled by the placeholder. When an investment transaction is controlled by a placeholder, Quicken will do what it takes to prevent that transaction from affecting the cash balance of the account. When an investment account has a linked checking account, that linked checking account contains the cash balance ... and the backfill cash transaction prevents the balance of the linked checking account from changing.

[* At one time, there was a bug (Q2010, I think) that caused Quicken to create backfilled cash transactions for reinvestment transactions ... which should not happen since reinvestment transactions don't affect the cash balance of the account. I think the bug was fixed, but I'm not certain.]

Normally backfill cash transactions wouldn't be considered errors; I don't know what problem Quicken found with yours.

[If you want to see all the backfill cash transactions, tell Quicken to display hidden investment transactions. Edit > Preferences > Quicken Program > Investment transactions.]

It does sound possible, but I have no experience in this area.

My prescription for the backfill cash transactions would be to get rid of the placeholders, then get rid of the backfill cash transactions, then re-enter the transactions that the backfill cash transactions were linked to.

Thank you very much John. As usual you were very helpful.

Since I defragmented the encrypted partition and enlarged it everything seems to work fine now.

I will follow your advice about the splits and backfill transactions.

Happy fourth.