Download and reconciliation issues

Jackerson

I am trying to turn on the transaction download for an account I have had for a long time, but having issues. First, even though I have unchecked the boxes to auto enter transaction in preference settings, it still enters everything without me have the option to accept or not. I also cannot see the individual account settings that should be in the online services to choose the option to never auto enter until after the first download has happened. Is there a way to access these settings prior to initial download?

Second, and a bigger issue for me, is that I cannot see the checkbox in the reconcile setting to keep it from reconciling to online balance when it runs my initial download. I want the option to still reconcile from a paper statement for a while, but the check box is not available until after the initial download.

Thanks for your time and help.

Chris_QPW

Unfortunately, on the first download the transactions go into the register automatically no matter what your setting are.

This FAQ can give some tips on how to help on this:
https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7179327

On the reconciling to online balance.  I didn't think that turns on automatically, but I can certainly walk you through how to get to changed back.

And note there are two different settings, reconcile to online balances, and automatic reconcile.  Automatic reconcile runs the reconcile every time you finish accepting the transactions into the register.

If you go to the register and select Ctrl+R to start the reconcile and it goes directly to the Reconcile Windows with all the transactions, then what you want to do is Ctrl+Shift+E to bring up the Account Details and then select the Online Services tab.  At the bottom of that dialog deselect the Reconcile using online balance check box and select OK.  Now when you select Ctrl+R you should get this dialog:


You can now select to change back to reconciling to a statement.

Jackerson

Thank you for helping. Unfortunately those check boxes aren't available until after I do the first download. So with the first download, what I experienced is that it put transactions directly into my checking account and auto reconciled them, so they each showed a "c" in the clr column in the check register. I thought I would be able to undo it by trying to reconcile, but it warns me not to go back to paper reconciling. Any other thoughts?

Jackerson

Is there a way to turn off using the Online balance before the initial download? (other than those check boxes, because they are not available until after you finish the process for setting up transaction download, which downloads and reconciles the first transactions brought in). Same question, I guess, but worded differently to help clarify. Thank you!

Chris_QPW

Jackerson said:

 so they each showed a "c" in the clr column in the check register. 

OK you are confusing "cleared" with "reconciled".  They aren't the same.

Cleared "c" means that the transaction has posted at the financial institution.  The very fact that the transaction has downloaded, means that it has cleared/posted at the financial institution, and as such whenever you download a transaction Quicken is always going to mark it cleared "c".

Reconciling changes, the transaction Clr column to R for reconciled.  This is a completely different process.  Reconciling is the process of checking the transactions in Quicken against the ones at the financial institution to ensure that Quicken's match the financial institution.  And if they don't correct them.

I'm not sure why online reconcile has been turned on for you to start with, I have never seen that.   But if the transactions are marked with "c" then the reconcile hasn't actually been run and there isn't any reason you can't turn it off before continuing.  The warning you are receiving about switching can be ignored.  If you were reconciling to the online balance, then the date you last reconciled might be in the middle of the month for instance and if you switched to a "paper statement" at the end of the month it might get confusing of what has and hasn't been reconciled and is all the warning is about.

Whereas it is possible to select all the transactions and change the Clr status for all of them at one time, and this might be done if you somehow needed to redo a reconcile, the "c" status isn't reconciled, and shouldn't touch it, but instead view it as letting you know that was a downloaded transaction.

Jackerson

Great info! I will work with that and see if I can get where I would like to be.