Notification, alert or field on registry when Online and Ending balance do not match

Ray Hallman

I t would be great to know when "online balance" and "ending balance" do not match. Presently, the only way I can find to know there is an out of balance is to either manually view each of the registers individually, or look at the account list within the tools menu and manually compare the balances for the difference. Rather than remembering to use one of these two methods after each import and manually calculate the difference, having the software present some notification seems much more efficient. Ideally there would be some kind of alert/notification - potentially on the home screen, but also as a new field on the register - beside the "online balance" and "ending balance". Maybe a field in large and colored font named "Difference", which would be the difference in online and ending balances. Another really helpful idea would be to change the font color of the account name/description in the list of accounts list that can be shown floating through most of the screens within the software.

Jim_Harman

For banking and credit card accounts, you can go to the account details and on the Online Services tab, check the Reconcile using online balance box at the bottom.

This will automatically reconcile the account at the end of each download session and notify you if Quicken's balance does not agree with the online balance. Is this what you are looking for?

Ray Hallman

Thank you for your comment. This may accomplish what I'm looking for but I'm not sure. I set up all of my deposit and credit accounts as you detailed. Interestingly, the account I most have issue with was already set up but I can't be sure when I did it, if it was prior to the most recent issue I had. This FI's digital banking system does not support express web connect but when I attempt to set it up it WILL download updated balances, just not any transactions - so any time a transaction happens this should trigger notification of an out of balance which IS what I'm after. At any rate, I set them all up and I will have an out of balance at the end of the month when some deposits happen to the one FI. Hopefully the solution you pointed me to will take care of my concern. Thanks!

Jim_Harman

You should not have an out of balance when transactions come in. The reconciliation is done after you have accepted the downloaded transactions, at which point Quicken's balance should match the FI's balance.

Jim_Harman

Are you saying that one of your FIs downloads the current account balance but does not download any transactions? That is a different problem and you should take that up with Quicken Support. There can also be a temporary mismatch if the FI updates the balance at a different time than the downloaded transactions.

In thinking more about your enhancement request, it sounds like you may be asking for something different from the auto reconcile.

If you have entered a transaction that does not appear in the downloads, a check that has not yet been cashed or a future-dated deposit for example, the reconcile process will consider it to be outstanding and will not flag it. This is a common situation and does not generally indicate any sort of problem.

Ray Hallman

Firstly, My apologies for the late reply. I found the notification of your reply in my spam folder. Since, I've whitelisted the domain.
Yes Sir, that's exactly what I'm saying, and yes it's a different issue that has prompted my more frequent need for the notification. ALWAYS when the FI changes the balance it DOES result in a mismatch of the online and ending balances. Usually, once I manually enter the missing transaction(s) then the balances match. The notification I'm looking for would alert me that transactions have occurred and I need to manually enter them to get the accounts back in balance.
I have taken up the download issue with Quicken Support more than a month ago after having gone through the FI who then went to their digital banking vendor who, as I understood it, had opened a case with Quicken. Quicken support instructed that I needed to work through the FI since their vendor had a ticket open. Subsequently the FI got back to me and provided the following from their vendor "It looks like they are trying to download from Quicken first, but that is not going to work for them. " . That is the best answer I was able to get. I made the case that the balance update is working and that I needed more detail from their answer, but I have not received it. I believe that ultimately the vendor needs to understand that they apparently have a misconfiguration and they and Quicken need to talk, however, I don't know how to make that happen. I will try again with Quicken when I get some time, I usually dread working with support as it normally doesn't result in clear successful communication without much effort. This may be a prime example of the user being stuck in the middle between vendors.

Ray Hallman

Update: At this point the accounts that are getting balance updates via express web connect but are not getting transaction downloads are not triggering the auto reconciliation process and therefore are not notifying of a difference between online and ending balances. I still believe this would be a worthwhile enhancement to the product.