reconciliation errors

Greydog9928

I am running Quicken 6.0.1 on Macintosh 10.15.7. One of my accounts through Pacific Premier Bank has all its transactions directly downloaded. After every download, I reconcile without issues for many years. As of a few weeks ago, I suddenly have a very large discrepency that prevents reconciliation. I checked my most recent statement and there are no new transactions on either end.

What is causing this issue especially since I am only downloading transactions.

smayer97

Yes, this is a very challenging problem. Currently, the Prior Balance is a calculated number, the sum of all Reconciled transactions in your account register. Often times the lack of successful reconciliation because of this can be due any one of the following reasons (which can be due to user error or a bug in Quicken). These reasons include:

• changed Reconcile status
• changed amount
• transaction was deleted
• in the case of transfer transactions, the matching transfer-to transaction was changed or deleted in the other account register, or the transaction was re-categorized as no longer transfer but a categorized Income or Expense
• if you Sync to Mobile, the Sync process changed something or you made changes to an existing transaction on the web / phone app

Either way, you need to figure out what changed and fix it as needed. The first one is the easiest to try to tackle. One quick troubleshooting step is to sort the register by the CLR field (if that columns is not visible, change your Column settings in the register) (you want the small triangle to the right of CLR to point down so all of the transactions marked as Reconciled will be grouped at the top) so the running balance of the last Reconciled transaction should be the same as the Prior Balance.  

Now either scroll to the bottom of the register to see all the unreconciled transactions (OR click the CLR column again to to show them at the top). Look for any older transactions that may have lost their flag. If you find any, you can easily reset the flag by Option-Clicking the field to cycle through the Blank, Cleared and Reconciled flags.

For any of the other reasons, you will have to figure it out by brute force, that is, compare transactions with previous records, such as, statements or online info.
If not successful, read this FAQ to see if it helps: Quicken Mac v3.5+ (QM2016+) Reconcile Troubleshooting.

Meanwhile, there is a feature in QM2007 that has not been re-implemented in "modern" QMac that would make this task far easier, reducing it to minutes or even seconds, vs hours or days. You can add your VOTE to Track/store Prior Reconciled Statements/periods.

First, click on the underlined link above to go there, then click the little grey triangle under the VOTE count at the top of page 1 in the blue banner, so your vote will count for THIS feature and increase its visibility to the developers by seeking to have the features you need or desire end up in the latest version (it may take a moment for your vote to register).
(If the triangle is black, your vote has already been counted.)

Your VOTES matter!

Greydog9928

Update: I went back to a backup about a month ago before this issue presented and reconciliation went to 0. I downloaded new transactions and the reconciliation went fine and went to 0. I updated my other accounts and now when I go back to this problem account, it says there is a very large discrepancy, but no new transactions.

Tom Young

I'm not sure if I'm following along with your description of events but it sounds to me like during this month some transaction or transactions before this month got altered or deleted in some fashion.  That is, if all transactions are properly presented and accounted for in this month but the end of month balance doesn't reconcile to the bank statement, them something "upstream" of this month must have changed.

Go back to that "about a month ago" backup and check the balance in the Account at that time, then come back to your live Account and check that Account's balance for the same date.  If the numbers are different then the problem is obvious.

If the numbers are the same then that suggests some previous transaction that was marked as reconciled somehow lost that status.

Greydog9928

Thanks for the suggestion. I checked the balance in both the back up from several weeks ago and the recent one and the balance is indeed different in both accounts on a chosen day [I picked approximately 1 month ago]. So I assume something got switched before the date I checked.

What do you do with this information other than create an adjustment? Seems like it's a software problem if it is changing reconciled transactions and would be very hard to identify the offending transaction[s].

smayer97

Yes, this is a very challenging problem. Currently, the Prior Balance is a calculated number, the sum of all Reconciled transactions in your account register. Often times the lack of successful reconciliation because of this can be due any one of the following reasons (which can be due to user error or a bug in Quicken). These reasons include:

• changed Reconcile status
• changed amount
• transaction was deleted
• in the case of transfer transactions, the matching transfer-to transaction was changed or deleted in the other account register, or the transaction was re-categorized as no longer transfer but a categorized Income or Expense
• if you Sync to Mobile, the Sync process changed something or you made changes to an existing transaction on the web / phone app

Either way, you need to figure out what changed and fix it as needed. The first one is the easiest to try to tackle. One quick troubleshooting step is to sort the register by the CLR field (if that columns is not visible, change your Column settings in the register) (you want the small triangle to the right of CLR to point down so all of the transactions marked as Reconciled will be grouped at the top) so the running balance of the last Reconciled transaction should be the same as the Prior Balance.  

Now either scroll to the bottom of the register to see all the unreconciled transactions (OR click the CLR column again to to show them at the top). Look for any older transactions that may have lost their flag. If you find any, you can easily reset the flag by Option-Clicking the field to cycle through the Blank, Cleared and Reconciled flags.

For any of the other reasons, you will have to figure it out by brute force, that is, compare transactions with previous records, such as, statements or online info.
If not successful, read this FAQ to see if it helps: Quicken Mac v3.5+ (QM2016+) Reconcile Troubleshooting.

Meanwhile, there is a feature in QM2007 that has not been re-implemented in "modern" QMac that would make this task far easier, reducing it to minutes or even seconds, vs hours or days. You can add your VOTE to Track/store Prior Reconciled Statements/periods.

First, click on the underlined link above to go there, then click the little grey triangle under the VOTE count at the top of page 1 in the blue banner, so your vote will count for THIS feature and increase its visibility to the developers by seeking to have the features you need or desire end up in the latest version (it may take a moment for your vote to register).
(If the triangle is black, your vote has already been counted.)

Your VOTES matter!

Tom Young

@Greydog9928

What you've discovered suggest some dollar amount for a transaction in a prior period either got changed or or perhaps a transaction got deleted.

You can create an adjustment, of course, but the "more correct" (and harder) way of going is to fined the error or errors and fix it or them.

One approach that should be fairly quick and easy to do is to open the backup and write down or print out the month end balances in the Account, perhaps a year's worth.  Then open your current file and start comparing the month end balances in your Account to the list.  If you never get a match then you know the error is in time period before that 12 month listing and maybe at that point you settle for an adjustment.  But if you go back a few months and at that point the balances match, then you know that the error occurred in the month immediately after that "match" month.  Knowing the size of the adjustment you might look at your bank statement for that month and see if you spot that amount, which might point to the missing transaction.  If that doesn't work then trace every single transaction on the statement to your Quicken file.  You should see either one or more missing transactions or one or more transactions where the amounts don't agree.

How much work you put into this is a function of how material the adjustment is and your own desire for "perfect" or "close enough."

Quicken is a retail-level accounting program that's touted as "easy", and "easy" almost always means it's also easy to make mistakes.  In the Windows program there's a default warning that pops up if you attempt to either change a reconciled item or delete it, but that doesn't stop you from doing either, and that warning can be turned off by the user so if a user simply rushes through that warning or turns it off all together, it's "easy" to screw things up.  The Windows program also has a function you can turn on that "protects" transactions before a date you set.  If you try to delete or change a transaction before that date Quicken throws up a warning and demands a password before you're allowed to do either.  So the function doesn't entirely disallow deletion or changes to prior transactions and if you never turned it on in the first place, it's "easy" to mess things up.

If Quicken Mac has similar features I'd advise turning them on, particularly that prior period protection feature. 

 

jacobs

@Greydog9928 A good method for hunting down where a change occurred is the bisection or half-interval method. If you have 20 years of transactions in an account, go back to sometime 10 years ago -- roughly the midpoint -- to see if the account balance matches your backup file as of that date. If yes, you've ruled out a problem prior to that date, so the problem is in the past 10 years; if no, the problem is more than 10 years ago. Jump to roughly the midway point of the 10 years with the problem, and again check your current balance versus the backup file balance. Keep going halfway forward or backward until you find the months where the discrepancy first shows up. This way, you can pinpoint the problem month from 20 years of data by checking the balance on just 8 dates.

ericdsa

I have been having issues as well for a few months. I would go to reconcile and prior months that were already reconciled change. I noticed this morning that Quicken is grabbing reconciled transactions from prior month to match a new transaction. This then changes the balance of the closing date of the last reconciled month.

Quicken_Tyka

Hello @ericdsa

Thank you for taking the time to visit the Community to post your issue, although I apologize that you haven't received a response.

At this time I would recommend contacting support directly for advanced troubleshooting steps.

https://www.quicken.com/support#contact-support

Quicken Care has the ability to initiate a screen share to view the issue in real-time to review and research this further.

Thank you,

-Quicken Tyka

Scutmud

I have found that previous reconciled transactions were altered by the program. It duplicated a paycheck deposit that was previously reconciled and the next paycheck was missing. My paychecks amounts are always different, so if it reflected a duplicate the software did it, and not a user error. These are scheduled transaction, so it takes a very conscientious effort to enter them. Once reconciled there would be no reason to change those specific transactions.

15 year Long time user.

Chris_QPW

I don't know if this applies to the Mac side, but these kinds of things have been linked to syncing to Mobile/Web on the Windows side.

annieca34

I have had exactly the same problem as ericdsa. I was perfectly reconciled in my accounts until 11/20. When I got around to reconciling after Christmas, a random discrepancy amount occurred. I wen't back first a month and then jumped back until I got to 1/20. In every case, there was a reconciliation error--usually of hundreds of dollars. After hours on the phone with Support, I was finally told there was a coding error in the latest update I had downloaded. It has been well over a month and when Q is questioned I'm told they haven't got around to fixing it. What the XXXX does that mean? /fortunately I had already run my tax reports or I would really come unglued. Is there a live person I can talk to about this? I'm tempted to turn it over to one of my grandkids. They can't do any worse.

jacobs

I believe you got wrong information from the Quicken Support representative you spoke with.

There was an issue in the original 6.1.0 release where some unreconciled transactions weren't showing up in the re-reconcile window, but they changed it in 6.1.1 (which was released less than month ago) and, I believe, resolved that issue.

But you're describing something back in December, which is before 6.1.0 was released, right?

The most typical cause for reconciliation problems is that a previous transaction was inadvertently deleted or changed somehow. The amount Quicken shows when it reconciles is very simply the sum of all the money in and out in your account's entire history -- so i that value is off, then something has changed. These types of problems are exactly why the new reconciliation history in version 6.1.x is so helpful: it is able to show any deleted or changed transactions which were previously reconciled. Unfortunately, it doesn't have a history of the past, only moving forward, so you have to hunt down the problem manually or make an adjustment. (If you want suggestions on hunting down reconciliation problems, post back here and I'm happy to offer some.) 

annieca34

I just spent another hour + with Quicken showing the problem to the Rep. In the end, after consulting with his supervisor and promising to escalate the problem (again), I was told there was no solution. There are no transactions in any of my accounts that account for the error. We went through one of my accounts with fewer entries line-by-line and tried to reconcile, including screen sharing. I have NEVER had a problem reconciling before. My memory is hazy about when this started, but the Rep verified it started after I installed the last upgrade.

Any more ideas?

ericdsa

I realized that already reconciled (green check) items were being used to match new items. When they move that changes previously reconciled balances. Quicken now allows you to reject these, so I do that when I see green checks after last install. That puts them back and corrects already reconciled balances.

So at least in my situation with SunTrust as my bank that seems to correct that issue, but I should not have to do that. Related to that, I have always had an issue with multiple transactions of the same amount. Quicken sees only one when in fact there are multiples. I avoid buying exactly $20 in gas because of this issue. My wife however uses nfc to buy from vending machines at work (always the same amounts) and she buys a lot on QVC with EZPay. Refunds are always issued per month, so 5 pays on a return gets you back 5 credits of the same value at the same time.

Quicken needs to do a better job parsing the bank info, the extra work makes me ask every year why I pay for my subscription .

Jebshaw

I have been experiencing these same issues for the last few months. It was bad enough that USAA and Quicken were not on the same page with instructions and support of a lot of recent changes. [Removed-Rant/Disruptive]