problem with old accounts

John N2

I have been a Quicken customer for decades and my files are that old as well. Quicken apparently deletes some portion of the files ,I assume, to save space. For example my starting balance back in 2000 is now shown as over -$30,000. A whole year of negative balances etc. This was weird, but it was not a problem until a $1,600 discrepancy appeared between my quicken register and my bank balance. This difference suddenly appeared and I traced in back many months. I adjusted the beginning account balance $1600 and it fixed the problem, but I was wondering if I there is something I should be doing to these old accounts to prevent this from happening?

Jim_Harman

What you describe is not normal. Have you tried a Validate and Repair to see if that finds any issues?

John N2

thanks Jim, I ran the validate tool and the resulting file was many pages long. Many, many "Quicken found an invalid transaction and removed it". Do you think it fixed the problem or is it just a sign that the file is corrupted beyond repair?

Jim_Harman

Did your balances change after you ran the Validate and repair?

John N2

No, all Quicken balances agree with institutions

Jim_Harman

The Validate and Repair may have fixed things so this sort of problem will not happen in the future.

But if your starting balance is still way off, something is still incorrect in your data. The only way to find this would be to go back through your register, looking for missing or incorrect transactions. This would be difficult with a checking account, because there are often uncleared transactions at the end of a month.

Did you do anything like deleting old accounts? This might cause problems if there were transfers to or from your problem account.

q_lurker

Quicken apparently deletes some portion of the files ,I assume, to save space. 

Just to be clear, Quicken does not do that - to save space or for any other reason.  There are steps a user can take in that direction (year-end archive and some file copy options). 

I suspect the issues found through the validation were the root of your issue.  Hopefully, they will be fully resolved now.  

Jim_Harman

Another thing that can cause account balance problems is editing transfers between accounts. For example, if you edit a cash transfer in an investing account to make it a Withdraw, the other end of the transfer becomes an orphan and can cause issues.

John N2

Jim, The quicken account is very old, did not delete old accounts but have transferred data files between computers as I have upgraded. The year 2001 - 2003 register entries still make no sense realistically (whole year without a a positive balance, only a few entries total 2001, for a checking account). I really don't care what those 20 year old entries say as long as the file is stable (not adding or subtracting old entries). thank you for your help.

q_lurker, I noticed the problem very quickly, it was $1600 dollar difference. the only thing I did was open, close, sync and backup the file. Looking at old bank statements the error/instability created an entry that predated at least August of this year.

Jim_Harman

When you say "sync," did you run a One-Step Update, or did you sync your accounts to Quicken on the Web and the Quicken smartphone app? If you don't use the web or smartphone apps, you may want to disable synching to them.

John N2

When I close Quicken, two pop up’s occur, “Sync changes to the Quicken cloud?” And one that asked if I want to backup files (not every close gets the backup message). My backup is to a separate USB drive, could that cause a problem? I don’t use the phone app very often, so I think I will ditch it. Thank you again for your help.

q_lurker

An all too common problem is that some unidentified gremlin can alter the Opening Balance on an account.  Check that value for this problem.  Usually, it seems some value gets entered when it should be $0 or vice versa.  

mshiggins

q_lurker said:

An all too common problem is that some unidentified gremlin can alter the Opening Balance on an account.  Check that value for this problem.  Usually, it seems some value gets entered when it should be $0 or vice versa.  

Some unidentified gremlin = sync to Quicken cloud.  

Chris_QPW

mshiggins said:

q_lurker said:

An all too common problem is that some unidentified gremlin can alter the Opening Balance on an account.  Check that value for this problem.  Usually, it seems some value gets entered when it should be $0 or vice versa.  

Some unidentified gremlin = sync to Quicken cloud.  

Also newly introduced bug that especially pops up especially for Express Web Connect and Reset or deactivating and reactivating the online connection.  Of course, sync these days Express Web Connect is using sync to Quicken cloud is hard to tell the difference.

EDIT.  "Newly introduced" is a relative term here, reports of this problem are at least 6 months old.

John N2

Chris_QPW, that may be it. The account/bank where the error occurred uses express web connect.