beginning blance on one account is wrong

wwwoolf

BEginning balance on one checking account is wrong. I went to bank and added everything on the account and marked it as clear and there is no connection. Should I try to unclear them all until something looks right?

Quicken_Tyka

Hello @wwwoolf

Thank you for taking the time to visit the Community to report this issue, although I apologize that you have not received a response.

One option would be to reconcile the account to either locate the discrepancies or add an adjustment to bring the account into balance. To learn more about reconciling, please see the information available here.

I hope this helps!

-Quicken Tyka

Chris_QPW

@Quicken_Tyka the article you referenced is for Quicken Windows, but this thread is for Quicken Mac.

@wwwoolf I'm a Quicken Windows user so I'm not sure on the details for Quicken Mac, but looking at different Mac threads there are two possible answers.  One is that there is an option called "Life Balance" that makes the balance match what the financial institution sent for the Online Balance by adjusting the Opening Balance.  But you say that it isn't connected for downloading, so that doesn't seem right.

The other is that in fact you need to adjust the opening balance.  Unless you start from when the account was open there will be missing transactions and the opening balance should be adjusted to match where you started in time for the transactions you have.  I don't know the details on how to change this in Quicken Mac.  In Quicken Windows it is just putting in an Opening balance transaction like any other, except it has a special syntax for the category so that Quicken knows that this is just adjusting the balance to what it was at that time.

Note I see this thread on Quicken Mac reconciling, but it doesn't have any of these details:
Reconciling Accounts in Quicken for Mac | Quicken

wwwoolf

well. Quicken support said to just add the adjustment which is quite large. This Quicken checking account was started in 2014 so changing the opening balance is not an option. IF I made any mistakes in recording the transactions from the bank, simply adding the adjustment won't help me find those so I'm kind of stuck doing that.

Chris_QPW

You say the account was started in 2014, are you talking about started in Quicken or in real life?
The account started in 2014, but just added it to Quicken, the opening balance you have to find is just the one before the first transaction in Quicken.

If you have had this account in Quicken all this time and are just now off then that wouldn't be something you would change the opening balance for.  And yeah if accept an adjustment then you aren't reconciling, you are giving up.  Since a real reconcile is finding what is wrong and fixing it.

For that you will of course need records of balance back to the point where you are going to reconcile.  It might be easier if you know that it reconciled recently to restore from a backup at that point and work forward.