Added Members 1st Credit Union accounts, now my balances no longer match in Quicken

joyL

I've been manually entering the transactions for a savings, checking and money market fund for years and everything looked fine. Just added a car loan so decided to go ahead and link all four accounts to my Quicken. The checking account looks fine but the savings and money market are now totally screwed up. I can't look at any bank statements older than a few years back via the credit union's website, so can't figure out what happened. Am I stuck reinstalling my last Quicken backup and needing to re-enter any transactions I've done since then? THIS situation is exactly why I don't link my accounts to my Quicken!

Frankx

Hi @joyL,

Sorry to hear that you are having issues with the bank accounts you recently "connected" in Quicken.

I think that is unlikely that whatever is causing those two accounts to be out of balance, could be dated more than the "bank statements older than a few years back" because Quicken doesn't download years and years of transactions, even when you connect the account for the first time.  There are exceptions, but typically, on the initial connection of an account with a financial institution, the most banks only provide months of recent data rather than years.

So the first thing that I would suggest that you do is to try to determine the date that each account first went out of balance.  I'd probably start with the money market account and compare the account balance in Quicken to the account balance on a bank statement six months ago, to see how much the balance is off.  Then write down the "difference" at that point in time.  Next go back six more months and do the same thing.  This process will help you to be able to isolate the differences to specific time frames and amounts.  Then you can use the bank statements that are available for those time frames to go through the transactions one by one - comparing the bank statement transactions to the Quicken transactions.  

One thing that I'd look for is transfers between those accounts.  Especially if the current balances in the savings and money market accounts go in the opposite direction of one another - if for example the current Quicken balance in the savings account indicates that you have $750.00 more than you believe you have AND the current Quicken balance in the money market account indicates that you have $750.00 less (or some amount relatively close to that number) than you believe you have, I think it is likely that the cause will be either a missing or extra transfer transaction between the accounts. 

I hope this helps.  Let me know of you have any followups.

Frankx

Boatnmaniac

Hi @joyL .  The issue you are seeing is not uncommon when converting a manual account to a online services download account.  When Quicken first downloads during that process it will look for previous downloaded data that tells it what to filter out of the new download so duplicate transactions are not entered into the register.  But manual accounts do not have that previous download data so Quicken will set it up as if it is a brand new account.  That creates two issues but they are not that hard to correct:

1)  Quicken will often enter a brand new "Opening Balance" transaction but your previous "Opening Balance" transaction still exists.  To resolve this: 

• Backup your data file for quick recovery in case something goes wrong or you do not like the end results.
  
• Mark the oldest transaction in the register (the original "Opening Balance") as R if it is not already marked that way.
• Click on the Payee column header to sort the transactions by Payee in alphabetical order.  Scroll down the register to where "Opening Balance" is.  If Quicken did enter a new downloaded "Opening Balance" it will not be marked R.  If you find it, make note of the date and then delete that transaction...do not delete the original "Opening Balance" transaction.  If Quicken did not enter a new "Opening Balance", then there is nothing to delete and you an proceed to the next step.
  
• Click on the Date column header to sort the transactions by Date, again.
  

2)  Quicken will enter debit & credit transactions into the register that are duplicates of what was previously manually entered by you.  To resolve this:

• Run OSU to make sure any new transactions not previously downloaded get downloaded now.
• Starting with the newest date transaction, determine whether or not it is a new transaction that should be kept in the register or if it is a duplicate of what was previously manually entered by you.  If it is a duplicate, delete it.  (Note: The dates of the manually entered and duplicate transactions might be a few days different from each other.  This happens because manually entered transactions are often entered with the date the transaction was initiated whereas the date downloaded from the bank will be the posted/cleared date.)
  
• Repeat this process for each transaction going all the way back to the date of the "Opening Balance" transaction that you had deleted earlier.  You should be able to
  
• Once this process is completed, compare the register balance to the online account balance.  They should match but if they don't then we'll need to dig a little deeper so see what else might be going on.

Repeat this process with all 3 of your accounts (savings, money market, checking)....I suggest backing up your data file after each account balance issue is resolved.  Yes, do this with checking, too.  Just because the checking account balance is correct does not mean there are no duplicate transactions in the register and you will want to make sure all duplicates are removed or it will cause accuracy issues for various Quicken reports and planning tools.

Did this resolve the account balance issues?  If so, that is great.  You should not be encountering this issue again.

If not, please provide more information on what you are seeing so that we can dig a little deeper to see what else might be contributing to this issue.

joyL

Hi guys...Thanks for your responses (Sorry for the delay in responding...my email has been slammed recently, so I just now sorted the inbox by "from" and found your messages ) I ended up just restarting Quicken from my most recent backup and re-entering the data that had happened since the last backup. And NOT linking the Credit Union accounts to Quicken. Your answers show what a PITA it is to try to do "automatic" stuff in Quicken for those of us who are not computer programmers or financial wizards. Plus Boatnmaniac's email was annoyingly unreadable because every line ended with a distracting "
"....I'm assuming that's another "lost-in-translation" computer glitch between however you sent your message and what was displayed on my computer monitor in my email (looking on the Quicken discussion page, it looks fine). I rarely use any of these Credit Union accounts, so it's not a hassle to manually enter my transactions. I was thinking about linking all of my retirement accounts to Quicken but it may be easier to just go to the holder's website to see how those accounts are doing. Thanks again for replying.

joyL

" & # 13 ;" is what should show up between the quotation marks....I'm assuming this is some invisible thing on this comment board