Mismatch between bank and quicken

Moorhatch

I have a transaction on quicken that has cleared my bank (TCF) yet does NOT show as cleared by quicken. I tried downloading from the bank in addition to using one step, and I validated the file, yet the mismatch remains. How do I convince quicken that the transaction has cleared? Marking it cleared causes the account to be out of balance when reconciling. This is a periodic problem with quicken which is more than annoying!

Moorhatch

Addendum: My sort option is "by cleared." It shows up on the register among the uncleared, yet the cell where is should say "uncleared" is blank.

Chris_QPW

Did you manually enter the transaction or was it downloaded?

NotACPA

Perhaps, did you input this transaction twice ... and it's the duplicate that's causing the issue?

Moorhatch

Re entered twice: No, that was the first thing I checked. There is NO cleared transaction in that amount, on that date and to that payee.

Moorhatch

Re did I enter manually or download: When recording a payment,I enter the transaction in my check register and in quicken manually and later update the account via one step. I download from the bank only when I run into problems like this. When I perform the latter (download from TCF) it still doesn't link to the quicken transaction.

Tom Young

"How do I convince quicken that the transaction has cleared?"

Well, the way that should work, irrespective of what's going on with the "matching" issue, is to put a "c" in the Clr column.  Does that work?

How are you allowing Quicken to deal with downloaded transactions?  Automatically entered into the register, or segregated down in the "Downloaded Transactions" area, waiting for "Acceptance" or manual "Matching?"

UKR

Moorhatch said:

... I download from the bank only when I run into problems like this. ...

Please download from the bank even if you don't have any problems and do so regularly, at least once a week. This way you have better control over your register, have to work with a smaller number of downloaded transactions and can spot problems quicker.
Downloading only once in a looong while may lead to problems with downloading too many transactions or not enough, because the bank only retains a few weeks of transactions when downloading with One Step Update. So, IMHO, it's important to download regularly.
It may be difficult to re-download an older transaction that has been downloaded already and was either mismatched in your register or deleted without accepting into the register.

Moorhatch

Re: enter cleared in the column: doesn't work as the account will be out of balance by that amount when reconciling the account.

Moorhatch

Re download from the bank regularly: not a bad idea since quicken has it's VERY annoying quirks. The only way I'll get the account in balance is to adjust it and then move the adjustment amount to an adjustment category created specifically to handle this problem. It's not the first time it's happened. Grrrr.

Chris_QPW

Are you reconciling to the online balance?

The online balance and/or date can be wrong, and as such you will be reconciling to the set of transactions.

Typically online balance problems are where the financial institution sends the pending transactions (which it shouldn't) and they aren't in the online balance or the reverse adding in the pending transactions into the online balance, which it shouldn't.

Also there have several reports of the online balance date not being updated, and as such you are reconciling to an older set of transactions.

Reconcile to the "Statement date" (You can change this in the Account Details -> Online Services tab by deselecting reconciling to the online balance).  The "Statement date" can be a balance given by your financial institution on their website for a given date.

Chris_QPW

Moorhatch said:

Re: enter cleared in the column: doesn't work as the account will be out of balance by that amount when reconciling the account.

Another possibility if this is a transfer is that it isn't properly linked with the transfer from the other account.

Moorhatch

Tom: I accept or manual match each transaction.

Moorhatch

Chris: Thank you for the identifying how to change the date when reconciling. will "file" for future use.

Moorhatch

in retrospect and interesting to me is the fact that my check register shows a check mark (which I make when accepting downloaded transactions) implying that, at some point, the transaction was downloaded. I wasn't until a later reconciliation that I found it as an open transaction with Quicken.

orion1

> @Moorhatch said:
> in retrospect and interesting to me is the fact that my check register shows a check mark (which I make when accepting downloaded transactions) implying that, at some point, the transaction was downloaded. I wasn't until a later reconciliation that I found it as an open transaction with Quicken.

I understand your issues......I hadn't updated my Quicken register in a few months, so I used One Step Update to get updated. My bank balances and my Quicken register did not match. After a few hours and web searches for answers I got things close then created "Balance correction" category and got everything matched. Now I'm back to manually updating my register as transactions clear my bank.

I will stay away from One Step Updates, as that works for me. Now I need to find a way to keep Quicken from contacting my bank in the middle of the night, resulting in emails from my bank telling me "someone tried to access your account". I can't seem to find where to remove my log in info so I can stop this. :(

Chris_QPW

orion1 said:

I will stay away from One Step Updates, as that works for me. Now I need to find a way to keep Quicken from contacting my bank in the middle of the night, resulting in emails from my bank telling me "someone tried to access your account". I can't seem to find where to remove my log in info so I can stop this.

You can start by making sure all of your accounts are deactivated from downloading transactions, at least for the ones setup for Express Web Connect.  The Express Web Connect process has Intuit servers logging in at night to get the transactions (Quicken Inc pays Intuit for this service).

Select Ctrl+A to bring up the account list and look at Transaction Download column if an account is setup for downloading, if it is edit it and then go to the Online Services tab and select Deactivate.

If that doesn't do it, then I suggest that you change your username at the financial institution if possible.
Sometimes the backend doesn't get the message that the account is deactivated and it will continue to do the downloading.  You need to change the username to block it, if all you do is change the password then you might instead get messages about failed logins.