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Your first week

What to check at day 1, day 3, and day 7 after switching.

Last updated: April 16, 2026

The import is done and you have a PennyBolt file. Now spend a few minutes each day for the first week making sure everything came across cleanly. Most problems surface within the first three days; by day seven you’ll know if the migration was complete.

Day 1 — balances

Check every account balance against your Quicken account list (the one you wrote down in Before you switch ).

Open each account in PennyBolt and compare the displayed balance to the Quicken balance you recorded. They should match. If they don’t:

  • Off by a round number (e.g., exactly $100.00): a transfer probably imported as a deposit or expense instead of a transfer. Find the transaction, check both sides, and correct the one that’s wrong.
  • Off by a small amount (under $5.00): a rounding difference in a split, or a transaction that Quicken carried to more decimal places than PennyBolt keeps. Find the discrepancy in the register and decide whether to adjust the opening balance or fix the transaction.
  • Off by a large or irregular amount: a transaction is missing or duplicated. Compare the register for that account line by line against a Quicken register printout until you find the gap.

Day 3 — categories and payees

By day three, you’ve probably made a few new transactions or done a fresh import. This is a good time to check that categories and payees are working as expected.

Review the category mapping. Open the Sankey report. Do the categories match what you expect? If a large band is labeled “Uncategorized,” open that account’s register, sort by category, and look for transactions that should have been assigned by a Quicken memorized payee but weren’t. You’ll need to write a payee rule in PennyBolt for those — see Payee rules .

Check for double-imported transactions. If you also imported a recent bank download on top of the QIF, look for duplicate entries in the register. PennyBolt’s duplicate detection should have caught most of them, but scan any account where you imported from both sources.

Confirm transfers are transfers. Open your credit card account and look at recent payments from your checking account. They should show as transfers, not as expenses. If they show as “Credit card payment” under Expenses, find the transaction and update the category to match the other side of the transfer.

Day 7 — reconciliation

Reconcile at least one account against a real statement.

Run a reconciliation for your primary checking account using either your most recent bank statement or your bank’s online balance. If the reconciliation closes cleanly — PennyBolt’s calculated balance matches your bank — the import is solid for that account.

If reconciliation doesn’t close:

  • Compare your PennyBolt register to your bank’s transaction list for the statement period.
  • Any transaction in the bank that’s missing from PennyBolt needs to be added manually or re-imported.
  • Any transaction in PennyBolt that isn’t in the bank is either a future-dated entry or a duplicate. Investigate before deleting.

Once one account reconciles cleanly, repeat for your other accounts over the following weeks. There’s no deadline — but getting every account to a clean reconciliation point is how you know the migration is truly complete.

After the first week

At this point, PennyBolt is your primary record. You can keep Quicken installed for reference, but you don’t need to keep it up to date. Your financial history is in PennyBolt.

If you find problems after the first week, the process is the same: compare the register to your bank, find the gap, fix it. No migration is perfect on the first pass.

See also