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Why does my credit card balance not reflect payments from 2009 in the register?

Sue B

Suddenly, today, a credit card register shows a balance of $71960 in the balance column. It is reflecting every purchase I have made and none of the payments since 2009. Yet (thank goodness) the bottom summary shows what I believe is the correct balance $1405. How do I recover the payments that showed yesterday in the register? Any advice is welcome. Thank you.

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Boatnmaniac

Do you have a recent backup file (from at least 1-2 days before yesterday) that you can restore? If so, restore it and then run OSU to bring the accounts up to date. That would probably be the fastest and easiest way to recover the missing data if there is not some other underlying data corruption issue present.

Another option would be to run Validate & Repair and see if that can fix the issue.

Boatnmaniac

Sue B said:

Thank you so much Boatmaniac. I ran validate and repair on the new file and as you mentioned it did not find anything. It is comforting to me, that it may not have been a user error. Before you mentioned validate and repair, I was unaware it existed for Quicken so I presume I should probably run it about once a month, even if I don't see any issues at the time. My first computer was a Tandy DOS 53 K back in the late 80's, but everything I do on a computer has been by the 'seat of my pants' so to speak, so much of how anything works is beyond my comprehension and when something goes awry I suspect I pressed a wrong button. I sincerely appreciate your help.

You are welcome. Some people think Validate & Repair should be run fairly frequently to keep everything running smoothly and consistently. Others think it should be run only when needed to help fix issues that do not seem to be otherwise fixable because there have been some posts that V&R might (not proved) actually sometimes introduce errors. I don't think anyone really knows how frequently it should be used. I fall into the latter group and probably don't run V&R more than 1-4 times a year.

Chris_QPW

Boatnmaniac said:
because there have been some posts that V&R might (not proved) actually sometimes introduce errors. I don't think anyone really knows how frequently it should be used. I fall into the latter group and probably don't run V&R more than 1-4 times a year.

Even though it is very rare it is certainly proven that Validate and Repair can cause problems, but that comes with another "condition".

First off Validate & Repair is code, all code that isn't trivial has bugs in it. Whether those bugs will cause problems just depends on the circumstances. This kind of problem does fall into the "unproven" category in my opinion, but there is no way I would rule it out.

The second and more likely problem, even though still pretty rare, is understanding that if you have data that is corrupted, there isn't any guarantee that it will be fixed, or that in fixing the data there might be data loss or even have it be destroyed to the point where the file is unusable.

Example of data loss. Linked transaction, that is somehow corrupted. The fix might be to remove the link between the two transactions. It might also be to remove one side of that transaction. What happens depends on what was corrupted and on how well Validate and Repair can get the information to reconstruct it.

Note also Validate & Repair is basically going to be a set of rules on what to check to see if there are problems, and what actions to perform if it finds a given problem to try to fix it. As such not all problems are known and as such not all problems will even have an action process to try to fix them.

I think one of the most telling things to note in regards to how the developers think of this operation is that Validate & Repair always makes a backup of your data file before it does anything.

All comments

Sherlock

If you haven’t already, you may want to verify the register is sorted appropriately and there aren’t any unexpected filters being applied: open the register, select the Date column header (you want the small triangle to right of Date to point up) and Reset.

Boatnmaniac

Another option would be to run Validate & Repair and see if that can fix the issue.

Sue B

Thanks Sherlock and Boatmaniac. I had tried sorting by date, and by payments, and that was when I discovered that no payments that had been recorded were now showing. I ran validate and repair and that did nothing, but the restore fixed my issue. I needed that bit of encouragement to attempt restore. Does anyone have any idea what I might have done to create this problem, so I can try not to do it again?

Boatnmaniac

Sue B said:

Thanks Sherlock and Boatmaniac. I had tried sorting by date, and by payments, and that was when I discovered that no payments that had been recorded were now showing. I ran validate and repair and that did nothing, but the restore fixed my issue. I needed that bit of encouragement to attempt restore. Does anyone have any idea what I might have done to create this problem, so I can try not to do it again?

I wish I could tell that I knew what caused your issue but I don't. There are so many things that can happen that can cause a data file to get some corruption. It might be something so simple and uncontrollable as a small glitch with power (surge, interruption, frequency, etc.) or a premature shutdown or the save process not completing properly. Sometimes it can be that there was a glitch in how the data file loaded or that the Quicken app malfunctioned. Or it could be something entirely different from these things.

That all being said, there is one thing I would do now if I were in your shoes. There is a possibility that whatever caused your data file to get corrupted is something that was buried in it and something just happened to cause it to rear its ugly head resulting in your data loss. This means that the issue could possibly be present in your backup files, too. I know you ran Validate & Repair on your corrupted data file with no reported issues or fixes but if you have not already done so you might want to run it again on your restored data file. You will probably get the same "no issues found" result but if there is some issue buried in your restored data file or in your Quicken installation it might just identify and fix it this time. No matter what the result, perhaps it will provide just a little more peace of mind that you won't see this missing data issue pop up again.

Sue B

Thank you so much Boatmaniac. I ran validate and repair on the new file and as you mentioned it did not find anything. It is comforting to me, that it may not have been a user error. Before you mentioned validate and repair, I was unaware it existed for Quicken so I presume I should probably run it about once a month, even if I don't see any issues at the time. My first computer was a Tandy DOS 53 K back in the late 80's, but everything I do on a computer has been by the 'seat of my pants' so to speak, so much of how anything works is beyond my comprehension and when something goes awry I suspect I pressed a wrong button. I sincerely appreciate your help.

Boatnmaniac

Sue B said:

Thank you so much Boatmaniac. I ran validate and repair on the new file and as you mentioned it did not find anything. It is comforting to me, that it may not have been a user error. Before you mentioned validate and repair, I was unaware it existed for Quicken so I presume I should probably run it about once a month, even if I don't see any issues at the time. My first computer was a Tandy DOS 53 K back in the late 80's, but everything I do on a computer has been by the 'seat of my pants' so to speak, so much of how anything works is beyond my comprehension and when something goes awry I suspect I pressed a wrong button. I sincerely appreciate your help.

Chris_QPW

Boatnmaniac said:
because there have been some posts that V&R might (not proved) actually sometimes introduce errors. I don't think anyone really knows how frequently it should be used. I fall into the latter group and probably don't run V&R more than 1-4 times a year.