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From: Jeff on 4 Jul 2010 12:33
On 7/3/2010 10:34 AM, John Pollard wrote:
> Jeff(a)nospam.invalid wrote:
>> On 7/3/2010 5:33 AM, Jeff(a)nospam.invalid wrote:
>
>>> On 7/2/2010 10:00 PM, John Pollard wrote:
>
>>>> Jeff(a)nospam.invalid wrote:
>>>>> My Quicken 2008 Deluxe started behaving funny. So I made a backup
>>>>> and then ran Validate. The Data_Log.txt file has numerous entries
>>>>> going back to 2004! They are all of the following type:
>>>>>
>>>>> Found backfill cash transaction: "the A/C number" 3/16/2010
>>>>> "Balancing Cash Adjustment"
>>>>> Found ex information for backfill cash transaction.
>>>>> Found backfill pair with id: 75354
>>>>> Found backfill cash transaction: "the A/C number" 1/15/2010
>>>>> "Balancing Cash Adjustment"
>>>>> Found ex information for backfill cash transaction.
>>>>> Found backfill pair with id: 75313
>>>>>
>>>>> What do I do with this information?
>>>>> What should I do? I have multiple backups but I think this problem
>>>>> has been going on for at least 3-4 months so it would be a hassle
>>>>> to reconstruct all these transactions.
>
>>>> 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.
>
> 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.
>
>>> 2. 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.
>
> 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?
>
>>> 3. 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.
>
> 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.]
>
>>> So I stopped doing anything else and sent out my message for help.
>>>
>>> Thanks for responding.
>
>
>> 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.
>
> It does sound possible, but I have no experience in this area.
>
>> The quicken data file was very fragmented and I have defragmented that
>> partition. After backups to an external backup drive.
>
> 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.

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