Discrepany in reconciliation when there wasn't any

KHC

I manually reconciled two bank accounts last weekend for Sept, Oct Nov. There was no problem.

I'm doing December now. One account reconciled fine. For the second account, Quicken invented a discrepancy for 8/31 and or 10/31. However, there was no discrepancy when I reconciled originally.

So, I thought maybe I entered a transaction meant for another account that might have caused the problem. But when I search for the dollar amounts of the so-called discrepancies, the search comes up empty.

I'm using the latest upgrade, Version 6.5.1

jacobs

@HildyS Did you upgrade recently from Quicken 2007, Quicken 2015-2017, or the prior release of Quicken Mac? If you upgraded from older versions of Quicken, your reconciled transactions are still reconciled, but no reconciliation history is imported. Quicken 2007 worked very differently, so the import into Quicken Mac doesn't import any reconciliation history. The Reconciliation History feature in Quicken Mac is relatively new (December 2020), so modern Quicken Mac only has history since that time.

You should be able to reconcile each of your accounts from the beginning of time until your last reconciliation date, and then carry on with monthly reconciliations going forward. Let's say you reconciled through November 2021 in your older version of Quicken. You should now try to reconcile through November 2021 in new Quicken. If the reconciliation is off, you will need to do some detective work to figure out where/why it is off.

If you have or can access old bank statements, or if you can still run your old version of Quicken, you should be able to spot check at a few points in time to quickly zero in on the source of the problem. Let's say you have 10 years of transactions in your account. Go back roughly half that time, and see if you can reconcile up until that date. If that reconciliation is off, you know the problem is in the first 5 years, so now go back another 2 or 3 years. Keep testing different dates until you get one which reconciles correctly or reveals a problem.

If you download transactions to this account, one quick thing to check is at the very beginning of transactions for this account to see if Quicken insert a placeholder transaction (it will be gray). Quicken does this if it needs an adjustment to make your current account balance match what the bank is reporting as your current balance. 

John_in_NC

Hi, KHC:

It's near impossible for another user to answer for your reconcile discrepancy.  (We can't see your data nor the before/after. You could have added/moved/deleted/altered a transaction. 

Select the account in the sidebar, and (from the menubar) Accounts:Reconciliation History. This should help you isolate where you discrepancy is:

HildyS

I'm having a similar problem - I'm doing the first reconciliation after upgrading to newest Quicken Mac desktop version and migrating my data to a new Mac. Everything is there and it has been working well. However, Quicken shows a difference between my statement ending balance (self reported) and the "quicken balance". It also indicates "this account has never been reconciled". I reconcile every month and the account has very few transactions. It's saying there's a difference of over $1100, which is not possible.

KHC

Hildys, this is very similar to me. On closer inspection, a whole series of deposits into one account were completely wiped out between July and Sept; I had reconciled the account through November. I think it was prior to the upgrade.

I plan to call Customer Support Monday if they're open on Presidents Day, Tuesday if they are not.

KHC

John_in_NC, thanks for responding. I opened History before my original post. It shows discrepancy in two months that had already been fully reconciled.

No need to brainstorm here further. I'll call Customer Support.

HildyS

John-in-NC, reconciliation history is grey, so I cannot look at it.

HildyS

John_in_NC, reconciliation history is grey, so I cannot look at it.

John_in_NC

HildyS said:

John-in-NC, reconciliation history is grey, so I cannot look at it.

1) You have to select an individual account in the sidebar, and 2) You need prior reconciliation period(s) (2020 and later) to show a prior month.

HildyS

Thanks John_in_NC - the problem is it acts as if I haven't ever reconciled before; the reconciliation history is not being found. All of my quicken data seemed to be intact after I migrated to this new version, but for this reconciliation issue.

jacobs

@HildyS Did you upgrade recently from Quicken 2007, Quicken 2015-2017, or the prior release of Quicken Mac? If you upgraded from older versions of Quicken, your reconciled transactions are still reconciled, but no reconciliation history is imported. Quicken 2007 worked very differently, so the import into Quicken Mac doesn't import any reconciliation history. The Reconciliation History feature in Quicken Mac is relatively new (December 2020), so modern Quicken Mac only has history since that time.

You should be able to reconcile each of your accounts from the beginning of time until your last reconciliation date, and then carry on with monthly reconciliations going forward. Let's say you reconciled through November 2021 in your older version of Quicken. You should now try to reconcile through November 2021 in new Quicken. If the reconciliation is off, you will need to do some detective work to figure out where/why it is off.

If you have or can access old bank statements, or if you can still run your old version of Quicken, you should be able to spot check at a few points in time to quickly zero in on the source of the problem. Let's say you have 10 years of transactions in your account. Go back roughly half that time, and see if you can reconcile up until that date. If that reconciliation is off, you know the problem is in the first 5 years, so now go back another 2 or 3 years. Keep testing different dates until you get one which reconciles correctly or reveals a problem.

If you download transactions to this account, one quick thing to check is at the very beginning of transactions for this account to see if Quicken insert a placeholder transaction (it will be gray). Quicken does this if it needs an adjustment to make your current account balance match what the bank is reporting as your current balance. 

bmastel

I am having any number of problems, but right now it's reconciliation that is paramount. When I try to reconcile, certain transactions appear out of date order below a green line and will not show up on the reconcile page. I using Quicken 6.5.1 on a MacBook Pro running Monterey.

jacobs

@bmastel In your regular register, if you ever see transactions out of date order, click the Date column heading to re-sort the register by date. (A second click will reverse the sort order, depending whether you prefer newest transactions at the top or bottom.) It's easy to accidentally click on a different column heading without realizing it, sorting the register by one of the other fields. 

If that doesn't resolve it, then the next step would be to examine one of those out-of-order transactions to see if it actually has the date you think it does. It's rare, but there are sometimes issues where a date that appears as 12/15/21 is actually 12/15/1921 instead of 12/15/2021. Was the transaction downloaded or entered manually? Click on the transaction and do View > Show Inspector. Are all the date fields in the Inspector window, which show years as four digits, showing the correct date?

If that doesn't resolve it, perhaps you can provide some more information. What would be most useful are screenshots showing portions of your transaction register and reconcile window which you feel illustrate the problem.

(P.S. A tip for the future: it's generally better to create a new post about a problem you're having unless you're certain it's the exact same problem being discussed in an existing thread. It avoids confusion in the thread with different people having different issues, and will generally get more people to see your issue because it's in a new, unanswered post.)

KHC

@jacobs , thanks for your suggestions. They took me further than the rep was able to on the phone yesterday. For the months that HAD been successfully reconciled but now showed a discrepancy, there was a "number of discrepancies" listed. For one month it was one ($0.03, so I knew it was the interest earned on the account) and for other months the count was as high as seven discrepancies. That told me that Quicken remembered there had been an entry -- and recongnized it as having been deleted.

The rep could not explain to me where in the database that record was kept. She also didn't tell me to take the next step ... which your message prompted me to try.

I clicked on the prompt to Re-reconcile. I opened a pop-up box with the VERY TRANSACTIONS THAT HAD BEEN DELETED. Every one of them. I could "Recover" them, which I did. That brought the month back into successful reconcilation.

However, the only info Quicken retained about each transaction is the amount and the Payee. It lost the Category and Notes.

The Quicken rep elevated my case to Tier II. I will have a call with them in 1 1/2 weeks. I still want to know why/how random transactions were deleted. The account is never auto-updated -- I only do entries by hand -- so dropping things like interest earned makes zero sense. Unless its a bug from the recent upgrade.

Anyway, thanks for being generous with your guidance, and ultimately more helpful than the paid staff :-)

bmastel

@jacobs Thanks so much. A simple fix per your suggestions as to an incorrect date.