Why doesn't balance in Accounts toolbar match balance in account when savings goals are surpressed?

James104

I have a three Banking Accounts with a register balance which doesn't match the balance in the Account Bar pane when "Show Savings Goals..." is DEselected.

One example is:
The correct Current Balance in a Savings account is +$2,980.75, same as the Online Balance and the balance on my bank's website. HOWEVER, the balance showing in the Accounts Bar pane is MINUS $10,438.07 when "Show Savings Goals in Registers and Reports" is deselected, i.e., don't show goals.
Right clicking the Accounts Bar pane and selecting "Show Savings Goals in Registers and Reports" changes, then the Current Balance in the account changes to $1,980.73 (Online Bal still shows $2.9K), which reflects the $1,000.02 in "goals" recorded in the register.

Why does the account balance in the Accounts Bar pane show the wrong amount when the "Show Savings Goals..." is deselected?

Observations:
1. The Net Worth total at the bottom of the Account Bar pane is the correct sum of all the accounts with "Show Savings Goals..." selected. and does not change when "Show Savings Goals..." is deselected.
2. Show current balance in the Account Bar pane is selected.
3. This seems to be some artifact from using savings goals.
4. An account Validate operation after a Quicken copy of the account doesn't fix this.

Dan Glynhampton

There's a bug in this area which has been discussed in the forum before, although I'm not aware that a repeatable set of steps to create the problem has ever been identified. 

I had exactly the same problem where the difference between the account bar and the actual balance was the value of the last savings goal that I repaid into the account, although some users have reported seeing the issue when they have never used savings goals.

The way I fixed it was to take a backup, then created a new account, selected all of the transactions in the bad account and copied them to the new, and the account bar balance is correct for the new account.  I then deleted the old account and all was well.

James104

How did you copy the transactions? My account has 14,123.

Dan Glynhampton

James104 said:

How did you copy the transactions? My account has 14,123.

I selected all of the transactions in the register (select first one, go to end of register and Shift-Click on the last one), copied them, and pasted them into the new register.  However, my account was only a couple of years old and had nothing like 14,000 transactions in it.

I've no idea if Quicken could handle copying 14,000 transaction in one go - it may barf on it and leave things in a bad state, which is one reason for making sure you take a back up before you try anything like this.

If it can't handle that many transactions in a single copy you could try breaking it down into smaller amounts - perhaps one calendar year at a time?  An alternative could be to export all of the transactions from the "bad" account into a QIF file and then import them into the new account.  Either way, you'll need to carefully check the new account is correct when you've completed the copy - I'm afraid it might be a rather slow and tedious process.

James104

It's more than annoying knowing there is a programing error makes the data erroneous - what else might be wrong?
I may give the copy process a try. I'm not sure how the export/import would work, how all the transfers in and out of the account would come through. It might be simpler to start recording transactions in new replacement accounts and retire these. Might need to add some entry in the old accounts, properly annotated, to correct the balances.

James104

I copied my file to run a test. Using the Planning tab to find the goal accounts, i made sure all transactions were deleted and then deleted the accounts. With all the goal accounts deleted the option to show savings goals disappears AND the account balances in the accounts which used to have goals are wrong.

Adding back a new goal account with zero balance restores the show savings goal option, and then the Account Bar balances show the correct balance.

Copying my transactions to a new account doesn't seem like a viable option - way too much work.

For now I'll just live with it, with a zero bal goal account, and the show goals option selected which shows the correct account balances.