Quicken credit card accounts increasing balance with payments and decreasing balance with charges

StevePP

Tech support has tried to help with no success. Two of my credit card accounts, as of 2-1, started increasing amount owed when I make a payment and decreasing when I make a purchase-exact opposite of what should be done. My oldest backup is 2-6 so cannot go back to 2-1. Today, I noticed it is now happening to my checking account. I think I have to start a brand new Quicken file but (1) I am going to lose a lot of last years data (2) going to have to tag and categorize a TON of transactions. Has this occurred to anyone else? What other options are there? Tech support did the normal repair stuff but nothing worked. I really need help on this

StevePP

Corrupt Quicken File

splasher

Credit card accounts are generally in the negative and checking accounts are in the positive.

Is the balance column of your credit card in a RED font and the checking account in a BLACK font.

If not, you have transactions that have pushed those registers into the opposite condition than normal.

StevePP

Yes transactions that are downloaded as purchases, in credit cards, are decreasing the balance owed. Payments to reduce the credit card debt are increasing the balance owed. It is now occurring in my checking account. A deposit just posted and decreased the balance. I do not know what is going on.

UKR

Are you sure the account registers are correctly sorted by Date and not filtered to exclude some transactions?

Do your account registers reconcile with the bank statements' Ending Balance every month? Or do you have either duplicate or missing transactions? Review your registers and resolve any discrepancies.

StevePP

All transactions are sorted by date. There is nothing excluded. All accounts that were reconciled in the last few weeks are OK. I look at a credit card register- example: I owe 100.00. I than make a 10.00 purchase. The running balance is now 90.00 instead of 110.00. I have a balance of 100.00. I make a payment of 100.00. Running balance is 200.00 instead of zero

splasher

You still have not confirmed what color the font is in the Balance column which I asked you about earlier.

UKR

StevePP said:

All transactions are sorted by date. There is nothing excluded. All accounts that were reconciled in the last few weeks are OK. I look at a credit card register- example: I owe 100.00. I than make a 10.00 purchase. The running balance is now 90.00 instead of 110.00. I have a balance of 100.00. I make a payment of 100.00. Running balance is 200.00 instead of zero

Is the running balance red or black?

If you owe money in a credit card account, the running balance must be red, showing a negative number, e.g. -123.45

If you're overpaid and the credit card company owes you a refund, the balance will be a black, positive number.

Somewhere along the line you will probably find one or more duplicate pay-the-credit-card transactions that need to be deleted, to bring your running balance in line with what you really owe.

StevePP

The credit card balance is in the red but again, a purchase is decreasing the total in the extreme right column (running total) and a deposit is increasing the balance. The Quicken tech support had me create a test file where we downloaded transactions for one of the accounts in question and the payments were correctly decreasing the balance in the running balance in the right-hand column and purchases were increasing the balance owed. I wanted to attach a screen shot but looks like this cannot be done in this community forum

NotACPA

A purchase should decrease the balance ... making it more negative.  You owe more, in the amount of that purchase.  You owed $1000 (balance is red), and you made a $100 purchase.  Now you owe $1,100 (still red)

A payment makes it less negative, you owe less.

It sounds to me like everything is working as it should.

Perhaps, could you take s snapshot of the register and post it here to further explain your issue.

StevePP

I have a screen shot to show you. I do not see the ability to attach to this thread. Can you advise?

splasher

If your forum account has the ability, use this icon:

Brand new accounts don't have the privilege, so it is possible you haven't been around here long enough.

Chris_QPW

@StevePP

If you don't have the icon mentioned here (not enough forum points for it)

splasher said:

If your forum account has the ability, use this icon:

Brand new accounts don't have the privilege, so it is possible you haven't been around here long enough.

Then drag and drop the image file on the comment box and that will attach it.

splasher

@Chris_QPW Thanks for the tip, I did not know that.

StevePP

Look at the last two charges. Unless I am going crazy, they decreased the balance owed. My other account that was experiencing this issue-I found the issue. Two payments of 5,200 were recorded thus giving me a positive balance.

splasher

I don't see anything wrong with the math in the image provided.  The two charges, -36.00 & -58.93, increase the amount of debt shown which makes sense.
Glad you found the two erroneous $5200 transactions in the other account.

StevePP

You are correct. I am not sure how am I looking at this. Let me check the other two accounts again and get back to you. Thanks for all of your assistance

StevePP

Thanks for everyone's help. The issue has been resolved. In one account there was a double payment made, which resulted in a positive ending balance. The other was more unusual; in my bank account, somehow after 2/1, a download was completed. The system went all the way back on this account to 2019 and entered an uncleared payment to one of the credit cards that I was having problems with. They were all duplicate and listed as uncleared. Once I removed them all I was fine.

NotACPA

"they decreased the balance owed"

NO, those charges made the balance more negative ... meaning that you have to pay more (you owe more) to get it back to $0.

The accounting in a liability account is the opposite of accounting in an asset account ... because you OWN the asset but you OWE the liability.

Glad that you found the errors and things are resolved.