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Marking a reconciliation as done

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This discussion was created from comments split from: Reconciling Account.

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KellyHallPiepmeier

What was the fix? I have Quicken Premier Windows subscription. One of my credit card accounts didn't reconcile in March, even though the credit and debit totals were correct. At the place that should have shown a Difference of $0, the amount for cleared balance was $400 less than the actual cleared balance total. Of course, since it didn't reconcile in March, I can't run the reconciliation for April now, either.

KellyHallPiepmeier

What would happen if I marked it "Done" and accepted the beginning account balance adjustment I'm pretty sure it would offer? How would that affect future reconciliations?

Quicken_Tyka

Hello @KellyHallPiepmeier

Thank you for taking the time to visit the Community to post your issue, although I apologize that you haven't received a response.

To answer your question, marking as done would enter an adjustment. An adjustment may be created if the difference isn't zero, but you don't wish to spend time to resolve it, Quicken can record an adjustment transaction in your register balance to make it agree with the bank's balance.

To learn more about reconciling and adjustments, please see the support article here.

I hope this helps!

-Quicken Tyka

Chris_QPW

It seems to me that the advice in the article isn't "the best".

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/6031128/uploads/editor/15/jtasi88t6fvt.png

Personally I have never had a bank that made such an error, but lets imagine what would happen if it did and you followed this advice.

For this example lets say you have a transaction and it $101, but in reality it should have been $100. And that this is a brand new account so the balance is zero before you do anything.
So in your account you have:
4/29/2021 SomePayee Groceries 101.00

And your reconcile comes out and tells you that you are $1 off, which means that Quicken calculated a balance of $101, but the financial institution says that it is $100.
You somehow check and find that that the bank made a mistake (note is more likely something in Quicken or the flow of data from the financial institution to Quicken, but going with the answer), and by the advice you allow Quicken to put the adjustment. What you will get is this:
4/29/2021 Balance Adjustment [The account you are in] -1.00

Now you go on and receive the correction transaction from the financial instruction. What is that going to look like? My bet would be that you would get the transaction downloaded again as $100 this time. If that happens you now have the above transactions in you register and the following one:
4/29/2021 SomePayee Groceries 100.00

So you now have duplicated the transaction. What's more since it was the transaction that was off, not the balance the balance stays at $100.00. But wait you now have $200 as the balance in Quicken. That means that you either have to delete the corrected transaction, or the transactions before, or when reconciling accept yet another balance adjustment.

What if the bank sent a $-1 "correction" transaction (not likely). Well then I gets you might be able to match the downloaded one to the one already in Quicken.

There is a reverse situation, which is much more common if someone is balancing to the online balances, which especially with Express Web Connect and QCS has proven to be quite unreliable lately. The transactions are right the balance reported is wrong (but normally they are wrong by "whole transactions" or the date).

Same as above, but this time the $101 transaction is correct, and the balance used to reconcile is wrong.
So now you find that the bank's balance is wrong an report it and they agree to change it. You certainly wouldn't want to put in the -$1 balance adjustment that would throw your balance off by -$1 when you know that the financial institution is going to fix it. If you do put that balance adjustment in then when the financial institution fixes the balance you will need to either go back and delete the balance adjustment or accept another one for $1 in your next reconcile.

Now why did I go through all this, one is because I don't think the article is giving good advice, but the other reason is I think it illustrates what selecting "Done" when the reconcile didn't balance.

And let me say in my experience from least likely this is list of sources of problems.

Financial institution makes a mistake on a transaction(s).
The user is using the online balance, and it is not correct.
The financial institution sending transactions (pending) that aren't in the online balance.
Quicken has changed past transactions in some way.
The financial institution sending duplicate transaction with different unique Ids (note this goes to the most likely when using Express Web Connect and the user has to reset the connection).
The user has made some error.

Note #2 can be the financial institution sending the wrong online balance or something in between when the connection method isn't Direct Connect or Web Connect (downloading a QFX file). Express Web Connect has these "players" that could have a problem.
Quicken -> QCS -> Intuit -> Financial institution's website

You will notice that I have marked the user as the mostly likely cause of the problem. It is extremely easy for a human to transpose two digits in a number and scan it many times visually and never see it. And that is just one example of what can go wrong.

On #4 there have been several reports on Quicken's sync to Mobile/Web changing past transactions in some way and that can certainly be the cause of the starting balance for the reconcile being wrong.

For me I don't think there is a use case that I would accept a balance adjustment.
About the only one that comes close would be say you have a register with years of transactions, and Quicken/user mess up one or more transactions way in the past. One possible course of action is to un-reconcile the whole register and reconcile it again part by part (there are ways to speed this up by splitting the task into halves). But that would require statements way back to that point. So say your register goes back to 1996, but you only have statements back to 2010, and you prove the problem is before 2010, then about all you can do it put in a balance adjustment prior to 2010.

But for me, what I would do is restore from a backup before the problem occurred and then work forward to get the account back up to the current date.

KellyHallPiepmeier

No one seems to be understanding the problem. I've been using Quicken for nearly 30 years, and have used the subscription since it started, subscribing to Quicken Premier. I've never had this problem before. My actual cleared transactions for March 15, 2021, total 1122.02. The reconciliation list reads thus: Cleared Balance 722.02; Statement Ending Balance 1122.02; Difference -400.00. The actual cleared transactions agree with the credit card statement. The Statement Ending Date is entered correctly. I do not use the online balance to reconcile. I use my credit card statement. All the numbers match exactly except the one that would allow me to reconcile the statement. I really think it is somehow a Quicken error. I don't see any way it could be a bank error, and my numbers match the bank's exactly.

Chris_QPW

A screenshot of the reconcile dialog might help (you blank out the payees if you want).

But based on what you stated I would guess that a transaction in the past has been changed.
The Cleared Balance is the total of all the reconciled transactions in the register plus all the cleared transactions at or before the ending statement date.

KellyHallPiepmeier

I just noticed that in the initial window for reconciliation it states that the prior ending statement date was 3/15/21, but that's also what I have down for the New Statement Ending date. Would that make a difference? I don't know why it has the wrong date as the prior ending statement, as the last date actually reconciled was 2/15/21. Is there any way to change that, or does it make any difference. The last transaction I find for $400.00 is a payment in 2013. This is used almost exclusively for groceries and medications, so I don't ever have purchases that high on this credit card. I'd have had to have changed several transactions in the past that totaled exactly $400.00.

Screen Shot 2021-05-04 at 9.57.44 PM.png

Chris_QPW

The date for the prior reconcile doesn't matter.

On finding the problem, you might not be looking for a $400 transaction. It could be multiple transactions, or it could be a transposed/changed digit.

Why do you have 10 uncleared/unreconciled transactions from 2020 and older?
Those alone come to $224.9. They certainly don't look like checks that might not have been cashed or such.

The Cleared Balance is the total of all the reconciled transactions in the register (even if they are past the end date you have put in), plus all the cleared transactions up to the end date (but not beyond it).

This means that if you have to make sure that all the transactions even the ones before this reconcile period are reconciled properly. It also means that say you had them reconciled, but mistakenly changed any of these reconciled transactions in the past, it will change the Cleared Balance and might throw off the reconcile.

For help with transactions in the past that might have been changed, it might be a good idea to see if the register balance of the last reconcile is in fact the same one you previously reconciled to. And if not you will have to go back even further to find the problem.

Note even if you don't take the trouble to track down the problem I would at least select all of the old transactions, so that when you do a balance adjustment (selecting Done without the reconcile balancing gives you a balance adjustment) at least those will be off the future reconciles.

AnnieRHolland

I have also been having new issues with Quicken that I've not experienced in all the 25 years I've been using it. I too am a subscriber since subscription started. I am getting seriously fed up with the amount of time it now takes me to keep going back over and over reconciling entries and finding errors. Transfers from our checking account to credit (pay) various credit cards (in full) each month never used to be a problem, now they are and none of my accounts are accurate now.

I'm trying to see if turning off the auto full on categories and payees to see if that'll fix the issue. I know the dates of these particular transactions do not marry up because the date credit shows on the credit card is different from the date the debit shows in our checking account - this should be easily reconciled but it's not.

This task used to take me just 5 minutes a day. I'm so stressed with this situation.

Chris_QPW

@AnnieRHolland If you are having problems with transfers then make sure you at least have "Confirm" on for transfer detection (or turn it off. Transfer detection is just a guess based on the amounts of two transactions in two different registers and the approximate dates.