Quicken Mac isn't calculating proper balances for reconciliations [edited]

Scott Rose

Oh wait, I just realized though — not sure how I would do this, because sometimes there are transactions from BEFORE the statement date that hadn't yet cleared by the time the statement came around. So those transactions wouldn't be part of that statement's balance yet.

jacobs

@Chris_QPW The problem is that the current Quicken Mac does not give users the chance to go back to review past statement reconciliations. In the old Quicken Mac  2007, if any past reconciliation became out of balance, Quicken actually warned you, or you could call up the list of past reconciliations -- which made it fast, using the half-interval method you describe -- to zero in on exactly which past reconciliation had changed.

We believe this functionality is being worked on for future release of Quicken Mac. Earlier this year, we found out that an update started storing the state of each reconciliation in the database. There's no user interface to interact with that data yet, but this was a necessary building block. And the recent "state of Quicken" message from the CEO, Eric Dunn teased "On the Mac platform, we … will soon release significant enhancements to Reconcile." 

Until that functionality is added, just checking prior running balances in Quicken may not prove very helpful in seeing what may have changed from the past, since a running balance generally does not match a past statement balance. If I have a statement from 12/31/2019 and check my running balance on that date, the balances won't agree because there were transactions in the Quicken register which hadn't cleared the account on the statement until the following month. 

Chris_QPW

Yeah I have heard about that feature that the old Quicken Mac had.  Interesting enough I think that is one feature that the Windows side has never had.  The most you can do on the Windows side it print reconcile reports.

There is printing a reconcile report "later", but it just works with the current transactions, so it is pretty useless.

Chris_QPW

Scott Rose said:

Oh wait, I just realized though — not sure how I would do this, because sometimes there are transactions from BEFORE the statement date that hadn't yet cleared by the time the statement came around. So those transactions wouldn't be part of that statement's balance yet.

That's a good point.  For me that would be extremely rare, but I guess for some people that might be common.  The reasons it is rare for me is because I almost never send checks any more, and I only pre-enter (using reminders) a few repeating transactions like paying the credit cards.

It does make it more difficult but hopefully I think you could add a step like if the balance isn't right look for any transactions with a date before the balance, with a downloaded posting date after it.

Scott Rose

Great, thanks for the ideas!

Philo34609

Hi everyone, sorry I'm late to the conversation but here's my $0.02

I've experienced something similar (I think) with a Capital One Venture card and only that card.

Occasionally the online balance will be out of sync with my local Quicken balance because the CC online balance is off by the amount of pending transactions that don't download into Quicken because they are not yet cleared.

In the past I've added a reconciliation adjustment to get the discrepancy to zero. After the transactions clear and download my reconciliation is off again by the amount of the adjustment (and later by any other new pending transactions) and I don't see it until the next time I try to reconcile and have to adjust by that cumulative error.

Hope this is helpful. My old math professor used to always tell us "Never Neglect the Trivial Solutions" so I'm putting it out there. It seems to fit the description of the issue and I'm doubtful that the root cause is that Quicken can't count.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Scott Rose

Thanks! In my case, I'm typing in a manual balance from my statement. I'm not using the online balance.

Chris_QPW

@Philo34609 For what it is worth, if the online balance is wrong because of pending transactions then it most likely the fault of the financial institution.  The online balance shouldn't be including the pending transactions (If the account is setup as Direct Connect it is definitely the financial institution's fault.  If setup for Quicken Connect there is a chance that the problem is with the way The Intuit servers are fetching this information).

Given that you know this is the case then it might be best to not reconcile to the online balance because it is clearly wrong.  And as they say two wrongs do not make a right.  The only balance is wrong, and you applying an adjustment is wrong because you are not reconciling to what is really happening at your financial institution.

One other possible way is to wait to reconcile to a point where you know there isn't any pending transactions.

Joe Ciccio

The current versions of Quicken Mac appear to have a reconciliation problem since July. I have been using Quicken for my business since the 1st version and my data goes back 30+ years. My data is uploaded using Quicken Connect, and I reconcile each month to my bank and credit card statements. The Pre and Post balances on my Quicken bank register match to the penny with the statements for each month. But when attempting to reconcile, Quicken calculates a balance that is thousands different from both my statements and the actual register.

jacobs

@Joe Ciccio  I'd encourage you to read through this thread from the beginning. Quicken is not calculating your balance incorrectly; what you're seeing indicates that some transaction(s) in the past are missing or modified, resulting in the discrepancy when you reconcile. 

Scott Rose

@jacobs How do you tag people that have spaces in their names? I was trying to tag Joe Ciccio, but it didn't work for me.

In any case, Joe, what I've learned from @jacobs in this thread is this:

At some point in between your previous statement and your current statement, one or more previously-reconciled transactions have somehow changed in your account (i.e. they have been edited or deleted).

It is quite possible that this is being caused by some yet-to-be-tracked-down bug in Quicken. It's possible that Quicken is changing some old transactions during the downloading process.

Chris_QPW

@Scott Rose To tag a person that has spaces in their name type @" then their name.

Scott Rose

Nope, doesn't work. I already know about the @ symbol, but I can't type someone's name that has a space in their name. For example, I can't tag Joe Ciccio, whose username is "Joe Ciccio".

volvogirl

Are you entering the actual quote sign " ?

Scott Rose

Ahhh. No I wasn’t. Thank you! Eh, I still can’t get it to work. Oh well. Thank you.

Chris_QPW

I will say that this forum is very "finicky" especially with the usernames that have spaces in them.  Sometimes the match won't come up, or be very delayed, and then sometimes insert in the the middle like @ts@tsldfsld.

But in general even if it doesn't expand correctly as long as you type it in right it will "tag it".

Scott Rose

Thanks. Yeah, I tried just typing in the name anyways, and still no luck. And I still can't get it to work with the quotation mark. Man, I really wish they would upgrade their forum software to something modern like Discourse — best discussion forum software on the planet! It feels like the current forum is straight out of the 1990's.

Chris_QPW

Back to the subject of this thread, I was helping another person on the Windows side that has a similar problem, and thought of something of a tip that might help people in this thread too.

The gist of that thread goes like this.  "I look at the credits and the debits in the reconcile and they are the same as on my statement, but it still won't balance."

The problem of course is in the Cleared Balance total.  As explained above the Cleared Balance total is the total of ALL the reconciled, and cleared transactions.  So it isn't "good enough" just to have the transactions for this statement correct, you have have all the past ones correct too.

Now the tip.  Given that you reconciled your last statement then if you go back to the last Reconciled transaction and look at its balance, it should be the opening balance for this statement.  If it isn't, something was changed in the past transactions.

jacobs

Chris_QPW said:

Given that you reconciled your last statement then if you go back to the last Reconciled transaction and look at its balance, it should be the opening balance for this statement.  If it isn't, something was changed in the past transactions.

@Chris_QPW  No, unfortunately, it's not that simple. If when you reconciled, there were any transactions during the statement period that hadn't yet cleared, they would be affecting your running balance but not the statement balance for the last reconciliation. 

For Quicken Mac, we're hoping that there will soon be a tool for revisiting prior reconciliations, which will make finding something that's changed in the past much easier. We had such a tool in Quicken 2007, and the developers have said they're working on something along these lines.

@Scott Rose The key to tagging someone with a space in their name is enclosing it in quotes, like this:

Usually, as you type, Vanilla will show you names to autocomplete, like this, and you can click on them:

Chris_QPW

@jacobs yes your right.

Scott Rose

Amazingly, my account balanced perfectly this month! 😊🙏

Hopefully, it continues to behave moving forward! 

Thanks, everyone, for your help! 😊🙏