Why do account balances change between sessions or shortly after opening a new session?

Robert Wilkie

Ever since I was switched to the cloud-based subscription version of Quicken, I have been experiencing an intermittent problem where one or more account balances change shortly after I open a new session. There are no indications of the incorrect balance difference and it easily goes unnoticed unless I just happen to catch it. This is very frustrating.

I usually notice when I reconcile an account because the new beginning balance is now different than the previous reconciled balance. Why would it change between sessions?

That seems to me that an older reconciled transaction has been changed or deleted or created. I have never been able to determine where the problem lies so I end up making a filler transaction to get the beginning reconciliation balance to match the monthly account statement. This is not a trustworthy situation!

I have been using Quicken for decades and used to convince others to use it. I will no longer be doing that if this is the new standard.

Today the experience was slightly different. I had not been in the Quicken application for about five days. I opened quicken and noticed a checking account balance. I compared it with my hand-written check ledger and it matched. I started entering transactions in the account on Quicken. Upon entering the first transaction of $7.55, I again looked at the balance so I could write it in the ledger. However, the new balance in Quicken was now $363 less than what it previously showed. I have no idea why it changed shortly after opening the application, but I have suspected this before when finding the incorrect balance listed :s .

This is unacceptable for such a product requiring the trust of thousands of people. Please help me determine what is causing this issue and resolve it.

BK

In my case about 6 months ago an entire account went to zero.  With recent release R36.17 three bank accounts' balances were off by a few pennies.  I have seen this anomaly for years and hence I created a system to keep things honest:

I write down my opening and quarter-end balances into the memo field of a manually created transaction on that date.

So if/when something goes wrong, I can quickly find the problem quarter (because the value in the balance column will not match what I have in the memo) and subsequently find the offending transaction.

- Most common one has been the altered opening balance.

- Experienced a few missing transactions

- Finally if I have to deactivate/reactivate an account, a duplicate transaction may get added if I forget to turn off the auto entry.

It is the lack of trust as you mentioned that brought me to creating this system of my own to manage it.  I realize that this does not help you directly but hopefully gives you an option to find the issues easier.

A feature of Quicken that may contribute to such issues is Sync to cloud, if the cloud dataset file gets out of sync or corrupted.  This is not an opinion rather based reading the community posts and the provided resolutions to reset it - and therefore I keep it off in the Preferences > Mobile & Web.

Robert Wilkie

Thanks BK. You are correct in saying this doesn't "answer" the question, but it does provide an option to make the difficult task of finding the change slightly more easily.