Set Up New Online Banking connection - inserts a random Opening Balance transaction

Travis Enders

So again the source of my attempts here were the ongoing Online Banking connection issues, but I disconnected several of my accounts for the last week and today tried to set something of those up again today. The set up was successful BUT -- aside from duplicate records, every account, completely different financial institutions, a random Opening Balance entry with the current balance was entered automatically. Needless to say this freaked me out when my accounts doubled in value until I found what was happening. Anyone else seeing random Opening Balance entries showing the current balance during setting up online connectivity to an account?

Chris_QPW

The opening balance it puts in isn't "random", but given your situation it can certainly be wrong.  

Imagine is you are just setting up a new account with the online connection.
It downloads say 90 days of transactions, but in the real world your account has existed for more than 90 days.  If all it did is put the downloaded transactions into the register the ending balance would be wrong because of not taking into account all the transactions that came before the 90 days.  With the transactions the current online balance is also downloaded.  So what Quicken does is calculate backwards to figure out what the opening balance should be the day before those 90 days of transactions, and then put in that opening balance transaction.

Needles to say if there are already transactions in the register then this can through this procedure off.  And in fact with transactions in the register more than just the opening balance transaction can co wrong.  As in there can be overlap between the transactions that are already in the register and what is downloaded.  And these might have to be cleaned up too when you switch from manual entry only to downloading transactions.  This should be a one time switch over though.

Here is some more information about this:
https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7179327/faq-i-have-a-manual-account-i-want-to-activate-for-downloading-how-do-i-prevent-duplicates

Travis Enders

I feel like this is a change to how that works because over the years I’ve followed this same workflow many times and never had the Opening Balance reinserted/updated or however you want to describe it.

Chris_QPW

Well the inserting of the opening balance when starting out is certainly not new.  On the other hand it isn't suppose to do it say if one deactivates and reactivates for downloading, but I think I have caught it doing that, so there might be a bug in there somewhere that is inserting it at times it shouldn't.  The reason and why it is doing it isn't different, but maybe the "when" has changed (and is wrong).