Bills & Income showing incorrect balance for one account

adambrock

I have one account showing an incorrect balance on bills & income. I've tried validate and repair with no luck. I am running R34.24 Build 27.1.34.24. Today's balance shows -$2,278.21 in bills & income but the balance on the left and in the register shows $453.41. Suggestions?

just_matt

OK, so mine's been messed up for a few months (register balance $500, Projected Balances "opening balance" of <$5000>), and I didn't have time or interest to chase it down. I suppose I was hoping it'd fix itself. After an hour or so of messing about tonight, I found it, and it was due to broken reminders. Here's how I found and fixed mine, hope it helps.

Bills & Income > Manage Manual Bills & Income

Using the bar graph at the bottom of the window, I stepped back month by month until the graph went extremely negative and stayed there. It was about four months ago. I clicked on the calendar at the bottom right of that window, and found three RED reminders in that month. I stepped back a couple more months to make sure there weren't any more, which there weren't. Long story short (details below), I deleted those three RED reminders which appeared to be broken (and one the following month) and that fixed my issue. My Projected Balances opening number now exactly matches my register balances.

Details:
Two of the three RED reminders were credit card payees, on different dates. Both of them showed $0 payment amount, and a due date of "every 0 [zero] of the month." The third RED reminder was for a car payment that was a duplicate of one listed elsewhere correctly. It had the right amount, but the wrong payee (correct lender, Wells Fargo, but my car payment payee is "Cadillac CTS-V loan") and the date was a couple days off. The following month's broken reminder was another credit card payee, but I don't recall if it was also $0 amt/zero date. I deleted it anyway, because I don't have any overdue bills.

The duplicated car payment is $492, so it's a mystery to me how $492 x 4 (months) plus $0 x 4 somehow added up to negative $5k in "overdue" reminders, but it's fixed now so I don't really care.

Hope this helps.

Edit to add:
> @UKR said:
> If there really is an overdue reminder, it should show in the Manage Bills & Income Reminders view. With the view sorted by Due Date, did the view position itself at today's date instead of the top of the list (IOW, the overdue reminder is hidden above the top of the view and you need to scroll up to find it.)

The Calendar view I mentioned above is the ONLY place that I found these broken Reminders listed. I looked in the list sorted by date, as well as other places, and they didn't show up there for whatever reason.

Sherlock

Quicken is behaving as if there are one or more overdue reminders impacting the projected balance.  I suggest you press Ctrl + J, select the All Bills & Deposits tab, left-click on the Due column title (you want the small triangle to the right of Due to point up).  Any Overdue reminders should appear at the top.  Note: Quicken does not project transfers on split entries of bill or income reminders appropriately.

If you haven't already, I suggest you try the Copy and Validate instructions as described in: https://www.quicken.com/support/advanced-data-file-troubleshooting-correct-problems-quicken-windows

If the issue persists, I suggest you recreate the account register.  You may want to review: https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7160099/faq-how-do-i-move-transactions-between-quicken-accounts

adambrock

Thanks, an overdue reminder appears to be the issue. I don't have any listed in All Bills & Deposits, but if I enter a transaction in the register for today, then hover over the day's balance on Bills & Income it shows "overdue Bills or Income: $2,623.78". Any where else to look?

Quicken Francisco

Hello @adambrock

Thanks for giving us an update and letting us know you're still seeing the amount. Another idea would be to double check the tabs inside of the same bills and deposits popup screen. There should be three other tabs although they should be included in the all bill and deposits tab but doesn't hurt to check. 

I would also recommend the validate and repair option if you didn't try it as well already recommended by Sherlock. If you have done so let us know. 

Once you get the chance let us know how it goes! From there we'll find out next steps if needed.

Thanks,
Quicken Francisco

adambrock

I did try validate and repair with no success. I also checked all 3 tabs on bills and deposits and didn't see anything that stood out.

UKR

adambrock said:

Thanks, an overdue reminder appears to be the issue. I don't have any listed in All Bills & Deposits, but if I enter a transaction in the register for today, then hover over the day's balance on Bills & Income it shows "overdue Bills or Income: $2,623.78". Any where else to look?

If there really is an overdue reminder, it should show in the Manage Bills & Income Reminders view. With the view sorted by Due Date, did the view position itself at today's date instead of the top of the list (IOW, the overdue reminder is hidden above the top of the view and you need to scroll up to find it.)

Other views that show past due reminders:

• The Home page view, My Money view, usually has a "Stay on top of Monthly Bills" view
• Again on the Home page, add a Bill and Income Reminders view to the My Money view or add a new view.
• In your account register, at the bottom, there should be an optional tab, "Bill and Income Reminders". Click it to expand the view.
• Again, in your account register, if the register is set to show reminders for the next xx days, this reminder should show as a transaction on the date it was due, in bold face font. Scroll through the register to find it.

adambrock

*The Home page view, My Money view, usually has a "Stay on top of Monthly Bills" view
**I looked in "stay on top of monthly bills" and there's nothing in the past that hasn't been added to a register. No amounts match.
*Again on the Home page, add a Bill and Income Reminders view to the My Money view or add a new view.
**Nothing in the past listed for "due now"
*In your account register, at the bottom, there should be an optional tab, "Bill and Income Reminders". Click it to expand the view.
**Expanded this and nothing listed.
*Again, in your account register, if the register is set to show reminders for the next xx days, this reminder should show as a transaction on the date it was due, in bold face font. Scroll through the register to find it.
**Scrolled through the register and didn't see it. Also set the view to uncleared transactions and it didn't show.

I also did a banking--> transaction report and didn't see anything that matched the amount.

Strangely, I added a $1.00 transaction fro today and now the past due reminder amount shows $2,580.16. Previously it was $2,623.78

UKR

If you haven't done so already, I'd say it's time to call Quicken Support on the phone and request help.  Let them do a screen share session with you to review the situation on your computer, to determine the nature of the problem and to figure out how to fix it.

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adambrock

I did more troubleshooting on this and found the file where it happened.

7/25 13:39 shows the correct balance
7/25 16:10 shows the outstanding bill / incorrect balance

Looking at the 13:39 file I only see one future transaction and no past transactions for this account. I also looked at manual bills and income and don't see any transactions for this amount. Any other suggestions?

just_matt

OK, so mine's been broken for a few months, and I didn't have time or interest until now. After an hour or so of search, I figured mine out. I hope it helps.

I was showing a starting balance of <$5000+> with a register balance of $500 or so. Here's how I ended up finding mine, which ended up being 3-4 broken reminders (which coincidentally occurred around the time I had trouble logging in and had to do some Validation and QClean stuff at the direction of tech support).

Bills & Income > Manage Manual Bills and Income

Using the bar graph at the bottom, I stepped back month by month until I saw my graph go majorly negative and stay there, which was about four months ago. Then I clicked on the Calendar in the bottom right, and the expanded view showed three different reminders that month that were RED. I didn't know what that meant, so I clicked on each in turn. All the RED reminders appeared to be broken (see below for details), so I deleted them, and that fixed it.

Details:
Two of them were transfers out to various credit cards, but with zero amounts. The third was a duplicate of a car payment that was listed elsewhere, but with the wrong payee (it was to "Wells Fargo" which is the lender, but my payment goes to "Cadillac CTS-V loan" and still had a separate correct reminder). Notably the first two also showed payment dates of "every 0 (zero) of the month;" I can't recall if the car payment one had a legitimate date. I deleted all three reminders in that month, and found one more RED reminder the following month, also with zero amount and zero date, which I also deleted. I saw no other broken reminders in the following two months. My numbers immediately were restored to correct amounts, and the opening balance(s) on my Projected Balances match the current register amounts on all three of my checking accounts.

The curious thing is three reminders had zero amounts, and the car payment duplicate was only $492, so it's a mystery to me how $492x4 and $0x3 resulted in a <$5800> opening balance.

just_matt

OK, so mine's been messed up for a few months (register balance $500, Projected Balances "opening balance" of <$5000>), and I didn't have time or interest to chase it down. I suppose I was hoping it'd fix itself. After an hour or so of messing about tonight, I found it, and it was due to broken reminders. Here's how I found and fixed mine, hope it helps.

Bills & Income > Manage Manual Bills & Income

Using the bar graph at the bottom of the window, I stepped back month by month until the graph went extremely negative and stayed there. It was about four months ago. I clicked on the calendar at the bottom right of that window, and found three RED reminders in that month. I stepped back a couple more months to make sure there weren't any more, which there weren't. Long story short (details below), I deleted those three RED reminders which appeared to be broken (and one the following month) and that fixed my issue. My Projected Balances opening number now exactly matches my register balances.

Details:
Two of the three RED reminders were credit card payees, on different dates. Both of them showed $0 payment amount, and a due date of "every 0 [zero] of the month." The third RED reminder was for a car payment that was a duplicate of one listed elsewhere correctly. It had the right amount, but the wrong payee (correct lender, Wells Fargo, but my car payment payee is "Cadillac CTS-V loan") and the date was a couple days off. The following month's broken reminder was another credit card payee, but I don't recall if it was also $0 amt/zero date. I deleted it anyway, because I don't have any overdue bills.

The duplicated car payment is $492, so it's a mystery to me how $492 x 4 (months) plus $0 x 4 somehow added up to negative $5k in "overdue" reminders, but it's fixed now so I don't really care.

Hope this helps.

Edit to add:
> @UKR said:
> If there really is an overdue reminder, it should show in the Manage Bills & Income Reminders view. With the view sorted by Due Date, did the view position itself at today's date instead of the top of the list (IOW, the overdue reminder is hidden above the top of the view and you need to scroll up to find it.)

The Calendar view I mentioned above is the ONLY place that I found these broken Reminders listed. I looked in the list sorted by date, as well as other places, and they didn't show up there for whatever reason.

adambrock

Thank you @just_matt! That solved the issue. This was really strange, I had recurring transactions in there for bill payments that have never been made from this account. The transactions started occurring in June of 2020. Best I could tell, these were all transactions tied to "online bills" - where Quicken pulls the amount of the bill from the payee's servers (like cable tv, cell phone, car insurance, etc). I noticed after I deleted all of these, that there was nothing listed under online bills.

Also, I've been using Quicken since 2006 and never seen the screens from inside the calendar. That'll certainly come in handy at some point. What a strange issue.

just_matt

Happy it helped @adambrock! Now that you mention "online bills" I think that may be the common thread here. Also, for what it's worth, those broken reminders were also right around the time I had trouble logging in for a couple weeks, authentication errors and such. I ended up with tech support and I did several rounds of Validate and QClean and reinstall stuff, so I assume the online bills/reminders got messed up in the midst of that snafu.