Reconciling credit card statements:
I am taking steps to sharpen my Quicken user skills to take advantage of the power of Quicken. For instance, I need to clean up the opening and closing balances of the last 3 calendar years plus the current year of the of my credit card accounts, and maybe apply the same steps to my bank account and cash accounts). These are all personal accounts, not business accounts or accounts for any third party.
As I go backwards in time with my card accounts, I have discovered sloppy reconciliation on my part for the cards’ account register when compared to the card’s monthly or year-end statement balances. In my Quicken data file, I have multiple credit card account transactions for my various cards. Most of the current card accounts date back multiple years – often 3 to 5 years. The out of use cards go back to 2009.
When first creating the accounts for those cards I was not mindful of assuring an accurate opening balance nor paying much attention to the reconciling the register’s balance with the statement’s balance.
Yes, all the transactions in each month or year are present in the register and match my physical copy of the purchase receipts issued by vendor. But, I’m embarrassed to say, the accuracy of the year-end balance does not match the statement, sometimes showing a year-end negative balance forward of as much as $2,000 to $4,000, creating a larger than preferred liability on my net worth statement..
In my financial affairs, I’m in the fortunate position of not having to depend on absolute balance accuracy to assure my financial well-being… I can be content, so long as all the transactions are recorded and match the card statement and all my bills are paid and my checking account faithfully balances each week.
But, now the balance errors make me uncomfortable, particularly since I want to advance my skills into such areas as asking Quicken to prepare a net worth statement,.
To resolve this, I know the super-users among you will correctly advise that I must bite the bullet and go through the tedious steps of reconciling each of my credit card accounts
The tedium comes about by the volume of yearly transactions – they go back to 2009 in my data file -- not the process of reconciliation. If my cards only dated back a year or two, I could wade through the tedium -- but back to 2009, that’s a bit much…without getting answers from you to these questions below.
I want to draw a “line in the sand” and declare any account or register ending in December 31, 2016 as “off my books.” In other words, I no longer care about the exact accuracy of them. But for 2017 onward, I want accuracy.
How do I create that “line?” Is it by archiving those older files and create a stand-alone data file for each year or multiple years of pre-2017 activity, i.e., January 2009 through December 2016?
If so, it seems I will then more effectively (by my measurement standard) spend my time in recreating the correct opening balance in each card from 2017 onward.
Can I then copy and separate the current cards by year (’17, ’18, 19, and ’20), then resolve each year’s opening and closing balances without, necessarily, affecting the respective balances in next year’s stand alone, and so on until September ’20?
Should I start the process with the current year (2020) and work backwards? Or start from the oldest year (2017) and work forward? Or does it make no difference?
Can I then merge those separate years into a contiguous card account (and register) and insert it back into the overall data file?
If so, I suspect it would be wise to create a test file/s of all this so as not to endanger the integrity of the original data file, however sloppy the balances of the cards within it may be. If it works, can I then merge it into the existing data file?
What are the consequences of all this that would govern the steps I take, particularly those steps that are not reversible?
