Why is the opening balance in quicken different from the previous statement closing balance?

Mary G

I can go along balancing statements beautifully. Suddenly, I'll try to reconcile a new statement and the opening balance is way off from the closing balance of the previously reconciled statement. This has happened for years. It is driving me crazy. Please help.

NotACPA

Extending the prior remarks,

The Opening Balance in a Q Reconciliation is a CALCULATED, not Stored, figure.  It's the sum of all of the transactions in the account that have an "R" in the CLR field.

If an "R" gets manually set, or unset, or an "R" transaction is added/changed/deleted, it's going to change that Opening Balance.

If one of those R transactions is a transfer to another account ... and the transaction in the other account is changed, that "R" transaction will be changed also.

Sherlock

If the reconciled opening balance has changed, a reconciled transaction has been added, modified, or deleted.  To determine the source of the change, I suggest you compare the running balance of the account register in the current Quicken file with the running balance of the account register from a Quicken file backup saved when the account was last reconciled.  One way to accomplish this is to print the registers to text files.

Mary G

Thank you. That might be what happened. Honestly, I'm not sure that it doesn't happen when I make no changes at all to reconciled items. However, all of 2021 is messed up (at least 7 accounts). I need to get these straightened out. Is there anyway short of manually unreconciling every item in every account for the last 14 months to get my statements to reconcile? Even if I do a balance adjustment, the next time I reconcile, the balance is off.

Sherlock

Mary G said:

Thank you. That might be what happened. Honestly, I'm not sure that it doesn't happen when I make no changes at all to reconciled items. However, all of 2021 is messed up (at least 7 accounts). I need to get these straightened out. Is there anyway short of manually unreconciling every item in every account for the last 14 months to get my statements to reconcile? Even if I do a balance adjustment, the next time I reconcile, the balance is off.

Again, I suggest you determine the source of the change.  Once you understand what changed, you may be able to correct the issue without much effort.

Mary G

Thank you.

NotACPA

Extending the prior remarks,

The Opening Balance in a Q Reconciliation is a CALCULATED, not Stored, figure.  It's the sum of all of the transactions in the account that have an "R" in the CLR field.

If an "R" gets manually set, or unset, or an "R" transaction is added/changed/deleted, it's going to change that Opening Balance.

If one of those R transactions is a transfer to another account ... and the transaction in the other account is changed, that "R" transaction will be changed also.

Mary G

Thank you, you did help me understand why it happens. The problem is what to do, as now, even when I reconcile and adjust the balance, the next statement is off. My accounts are intertwined. I'm thinking of changing banks so I can start over!

NotACPA

@Mary G

Before you engage in the rather desperate action of changing banks, try this.

1. Take a backup, just in case.
   
2. Pull out your old statements and work backwards comparing them until the end date and amount on a statement match what's in Q.
3. Select EVERYTHING in the account after that point and click on the CLR column in the selection to set every transaction to "c".
4. Re-Reconcile the account, month-by-month until you find the error(s).  Once you've found them, re-reconciling should go quite quickly.  The "month-by-month" is critical.  Trying to re-reconcile the entire thing at once will make finding the errors QUITE difficult.

Mary G

Thank you! I couldn't face manually setting them to not reconciled, and I didn't know that I could select a bunch and set them to Clear. You are a godsend. I don't want to change banks. I will try this. It should work. I'm learning so much about Quicken and am grateful for this community support, and for you. Thanks again.

MichiganAl

Following NotACPA's advice, I exported the current check register and the check register from my most recent backup. Surprisingly, the difference was all in the opening balance from 2008! So I updated the opening balance, and everything is beautiful (in its own way.) However, I have no idea what corrupted the opening balance.

NotACPA

@MichiganAl That "Opening Balance" CAN be tricky to get right ... because it's not just the ending balance on your immediately previous statement, but needs to be adjusted for any checks written before that date that haven't cleared.  Those non-included transactions also need to be input into Q to get an accurate starting position.

This is also why regularly reconciling your account is so important.

Chris_QPW

@MichiganAl there is an ongoing bug, that Quicken is changing the Opening Balance when it shouldn't be.  For instance, after one does a Reset of the online connection.