New opening Balance

ckn

I reconciled my all accounts up to March in April. I'm starting to reconcile my accounts now up to July, but all my accounts have a new entry for Opening Balance dated between March 15 and April 15. Do you know what caused this issue?

imdcareys

I really don't know based on your question. I can offer something that happened recently that changed the opening balances in some of my accounts. I had a separate issue which caused me to delete my web based data and then refresh it from my desktop data. After I did that, some of my opening balances changed from the zero amount I had entered to some other number that Quicken - for whatever reason - derived to use. It may have been based on a opening balance download from my financial institutions that did not agree with my zero amounts. After I realized that, I just changed my opening balances back to what I had entered to begin with. Lucky for me, and not trusting Quicken in the outset, I had put a note in the Opening Balance Memo field as a hint to fix it when Quicken might actually change it.

You might be lucky and see that your current balance today is the same as your current opening balance, and adjust the current opening balance appropriately. For my situation, I had originally set the opening balances as ZERO, and entered adjusting entries to get the actual balance to be correct in Q. 

Hope this helps

Jim26@

I thought I was going crazy, but when I download transactions, sometimes my automatic reconciliation fails with some kind of odd amount. After several instances and looking at a lot of transaction history, I have concluded that when I do transaction download with automatic reconciliation, that sometimes Quicken alters the opening balance of the account causing it to fail a reconciliation that just one week prior was fine. I have to go adjust the several years old opening balance to put the bank account back into balance and reconcile.

A J

This is happening to me also. It is happening in more than just one account and started a couple of months ago. Like Jim26 it happens when have to reset accounts that fail to update/download. I always reconcile all my accounts make sure my balances and online balances agree. I too have found that it is Quicken altering on opening balance of the account. Sometimes it is a couple of cents and other times it will change the opening balance to negative amount.

ckn

Thank you all for your comments and suggestions. I went back to the beginning of the year and reconciled each account again. And created a backup. Now each month I check to make sure the accounts are reconciled and then do a One Step Update and reconcile the accounts. I'll check and see if I have the automatic reconciliation turned on, but I think I turned off that feature.

Daddio25

I too found that Quicken changed the Opening Balance in one of my accounts. It took me a while to figure out what had happened. It occurred sometime in September. I don't know what caused it.

There went several hours that I won't get back.

Mark Pedroia

I am having this same problem of Quicken altering the "opening balance" of the register, the first transaction if you will. This is what is throwing off any reconciliation. It occurs with such regularity that I've instituted a work-around by using the "memo" field of the opening balance to save the actual (accurate) opening balance so I can easily replace the incorrect balance that was modified by Quicken with the actual; so I can accurately reconcile. Using the value Q places in the opening balance, I've searched for where that might come from. Maybe the total of unreconciled transactions or the value of Savings Goals from the account. To date, no luck in determining WHERE Quicken is finding the value it replaces as my opening balance. This is occurring in multiple accounts (mostly banking) and in more than one data file so I'm certain it's not just my file

Dr John

I just had Quicken create a new opening balance transaction for a credit card I started in 2018. There was no opening balance for this card but suddenly it has a OB transaction! I had validated my file a few days ago -- could Quicken create Opening Balance transactions when it validates? Also had a Jan 2020 transaction simply disappear from this same account a few months ago. Is Quicken getting quirky or am I being hacked?

kcb

Here we are at the end of February 2022. I am having the same problem. This appears to be ongoing, and does not seem to be isolated to any one particular institution. Many of the complaints, I mean Discussions, have been closed for comments. As I mentioned in another comment, some of it I have blamed on One Step Update not operating correctly. Then to have the go-to solution change the opening balance. Then running around in circles, waving arms wildly, and shrieking. Like you, I have no idea what is going on, nor have I figured out where in the world Quicken found the number it used to recreate my opening balance in more than one account.

Don't really know why Quicken has not or won't fix it. The only solution (which we all seem to hate) is to use a back-up file. Bummer.

imdcareys

@kcb - I think the problem happens when an FI or Quicken changes something in the download process and you get an enormous number of transactions - which Quicken takes to be your first download - and the first of them is the opening balance as of the first transaction downloaded. The Quicken application may not know that is happening. That's just my theory and maybe a SuperUser will know.

Since I have seen this happen several times, I record a zero opening balance, and make another transaction with an adjustment to the actual opening balance. Then, when an FI update breaks it, I just open the "All Transactions", filter on Opening Balance, and set them all to zero. That at least allows a quick correction.