How to manage historic transactions pulled in from linked accounts as a new user? (edited)

Question

New to Quicken Personal and Business, changing over from an old Access based system.

When I link my bank accounts and credit cards, it pulls in a couple of years of historic data, now of which is categorized, or is mostly incorrectly categorized…

I was hoping for a 'clean start' in Quicken and now not sure whether to delete everything pre-Quicken, or spend hours going back through transactions and categorizing them correctly, or just put up with the fact that before June 2026, ignore the reports…

Any suggestions or rules I can set?

Appreciate any advice - thanks!

Coach Jon · Accepted Answer

Hello @FrameAndFinance,

Thank you for reaching out, and welcome! In Quicken Simplifi, most banks allow you to download 90 days' worth of data per account. If you want a fresh start, you could either delete all the transactions that have already been downloaded prior to a certain date of your choosing, or if it is just reports that you are worried about regarding the older transactions, you can set up filters and a date range in your reports to ignore those transactions. Our support article goes over these filter and view options for reports here:

https://support.simplifi.quicken.com/en/articles/4592676-using-reports-on-the-quicken-simplifi-web-app#h_c1914ff706

As for Transaction Rules, you can set up rules to manage your transactions going forward so they always come in the way you would like. Transaction Rules can be used to have Quicken Simplifi automatically recognize your incoming transactions based on specific or broad "if" conditions, such as the payee or amount, and then apply "then" conditions, such as rename payee, update category, and tag. Our support article goes into more detail here:

https://support.simplifi.quicken.com/en/articles/4792733-how-to-use-transaction-rules-in-the-web-app#h_22b9a65773

We also have a great idea post you can vote for here regarding limiting the date range of downloaded transactions in the initial connection:

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/16472/ability-to-limit-date-range-of-downloaded-transactions-during-the-initial-connection-edited

I hope this information helps!

Coach Jon · Accepted Answer

Hello @FrameAndFinance,

Thanks for the reply! Once a transaction has been downloaded from your bank, it will not be downloaded again. This means that if you download a transaction and later delete it in error, running another update will not replace the deleted transaction. So if you wish to delete transactions prior to this month, that would be fine, and you would not need to worry about the deleted transactions returning.