Perpetual Balance Adjustments

Wizeguy400

I have been using Quicken since 2003 on an old Apple computer and eventually transferring to Windows. Every so often, for no obvious reason, when I’ve reconciled my checking account, I get a Balance adjustment error, which I apply. But it appears that these Balance Adjustments never end, but rather accumulate over time. Is there someway to end this situation permanently?

NotACPA

Balance adjustments happen when your account isn't truly reconciled.  There's a transaction missing,  deleted, duplicated, recorded incorrectly or otherwise wrong.

The only way to end this cycle is to go back to when your account was correctly reconciled (Q amount and date equaled a statement amount and date), UN-reconcile everything after that point and re-reconcile month by month until you find and correct the errors.

NOTE that deleting one side of a transfer transaction will delete BOTH sides of the transaction.

Also note that manually changing a transactions CLR value will also result in an incorrect reconciliation.

Wizeguy400

Thanks for your quick response. I’m not sure that this solution is doable. My register goes back to 2003 and it appears that the first adjustment occurred in 2006. I doubt that I have supporting documents that would allow me to accurately perform that type of extended reconciliation. I’m certain that numerous Quicken upgrades took place over the time span and at least one move from an Apple version of Quicken to Windows took place, as well as migration to a couple of different Windows laptops. Having had an extensive career in IT, I know that product updates don’t always get it right the first time and the cleanup of any problems that result from upgrades can only be corrected if the user (me) finds the problem and reports back to the vendor (Quicken, which itself went thru ownership changes) in a reasonable amount of time.
Might take a shot at copying the file and taking a shot anyway. Thanks again.

Chris_QPW

It should be possible to do one balance adjustment to get your account back into a point where you can reconcile from there on.

The key points though would be to make sure you have picked a point where you are sure that what you are adjusting for is really in line with what the financial institution has.  Say you reconcile to last month's ending balance and there are some transactions that are still in the cleared or uncleared state.  You have to carefully select the ones that you know aren't going to show up in the future, but make sure you don't include transactions that will be in future reconciling.

Once that is done and you do the adjustment, you should be set for the future, but here is the kicker.
There are reports of the Opening Balance being changed at times.  Also, if you are using Sync to Mobile/Web it is possible that it might alter past transactions.  On top of that the Online Balance/date has proved to be troublesome lately.  So, if you go to reconcile in the future you need to be aware of this and track down what through it off this time.