I feel like I’ve mostly made my peace with closed systems. There are definite advantages to owning your digital life where possible, however . These very words are written on my own personal blog, whose domain I own. I’m also all in on the Apple ecosystem, and I buy into other systems as well. For the most part my digital life lives are in harmony, but on occasion the reminder comes about that I don’t actually own a lot of my things I pay for and that fact can be uncomfortable.

I pay an annual subscription for budget tracking software to Quicken called Simplifi. I’ve been at it for 3 years now (I’m reminded of this because it just renewed this week). Having used the same service for years I’ve got a lot of historical data and it’s fun to see my spending and earning fluctuate month to month and year to year. This is especially powerful since my income is variable being a commissioned Mortgage Lender.

This week shortly after my subscription renewed, my main credit card that most of my spending is ran through disconnected from the service. This isn’t unusual, usually when there is some kind of security or policy change the logins will have to be renewed, I don’t have a problem with this. The problem arrives when I went in to refresh the login. Either the process changed or I clicked somewhere I hadn’t before. Whichever the case, I ended up duplicating my most heavily used credit card and in so doing every transaction that has been made on that credit card was duplicated within Simplifi’s system.. for the entire history I’ve used the service.

Concerning… but also easily fixable right? Just delete the duplicate credit card entry! Well, I did that and apparently I deleted my original login, and in so doing I undid every bit of sorting that I had ever done in the last 3 years of being on this service. Every single month’s spending history was now incorrect. The total I spent still was right, but all the categories were wrong. I reached out to customer service but all I got was a shoulder shrug emojI.

Historical data isn’t the end of the world, I can fix it going forward and all of my rules and sorting will be correct going forward. However, a huge value of having been on the same service for years is now lost and there is no getting it back. This one doesn’t have a satisfying end because I don’t have a good solution, I don’t want to go back to tracking each dollar spent in a spreadsheet and pulling my wife over to yet another service is unlikely to be a fruitful endeavor. So.. I complain to you internet! If you’ve had something similar happen, I’d love hear about it.