End of month date not correct on reconciliations

brett5355

For a while now on certain months, the account reconciliation screen does not have the correct date. Attached is a screenshot of March. Would seem to me that this would be a simple thing to make it be correct.
Thanks

NotACPA

February only had 28 days.  Why can't you simply correct that date shown in your graphic?  Typing an H in that date field will set it to the end of the montH

brett5355

Yes, I can fix it manually. The point is I should not have to. My QuickBooks at work does not do this. It always has the right date.

NotACPA

Q automatically brings forward the date of the last reconcile plus a month.  It has no way of knowing the as-of date for your next reconcile ... so how can Q fix this?

brett5355

My answer again is that Quickbooks does it correctly w/o my manually changing it. Months have set end dates. Program those dates in. How hard can that be?

UserDavidC

You're correct...months have known end dates.

But...

Reconciliation is meant to reconcile a bank or credit card statement to the data in Quicken. I have a number of credit cards and bank statements that I reconcile and NONE of them have an ending date that matches the end-of-month.

However, they do (generally) end on the same date every month. Therefore, the way Quicken handles the end date (by adding one month to the previous ending date) is the way I think Quicken should work for the majority of people.

brett5355

David, That makes a bit of sense. I do not reconcile anything but bank accounts in Quicken so I did not think of that. Still, with a bit of programming and an option for setting a date for different accounts, it would take care of that. It just seems like a comparatively simple fix to me since they are constantly "updating" it. I guess I will have to live w/ manually changing end dates.

NotACPA

@brett5355 OR, simply typing the letter H in that date field will correct it to the end of the month.

brett5355

Thanks NotACPA, I will try that next time the date is not correct.

A$tein_1

Whereas Quicken generally asks for the date of the bank statement for reconciliation the program is now arbitrarily selecting a date BEFORE the end of the month which does not allow reconciliation to the bank statement. How do I fix?

NotACPA

As discussed above,  is the arbitrary date the same  date as the prior reconciliation,  with 1 month added?

And you can, in Q, always press the + or - keys, while in a date field, to adjust the date.

PabloCortez1

I had the same issue. Instead of pressing the + or - key I manually changed the date of the transaction as it is typically one day past the end of the statement, which isn't always at the end of the month. However, in reconciliation, it didn't recognize the transaction. I had to delete the transaction and input it again, which took a lot of extra time. Is this a new issue, I never had it before? I hope the + or - key is the solution.

Chris_QPW

PabloCortez1 said:

I had the same issue. Instead of pressing the + or - key I manually changed the date of the transaction as it is typically one day past the end of the statement, which isn't always at the end of the month. However, in reconciliation, it didn't recognize the transaction. I had to delete the transaction and input it again, which took a lot of extra time. Is this a new issue, I never had it before? I hope the + or - key is the solution.

There is no difference between setting the date manually or using + or -.

Your problem sounds like the downloaded posting date is after the ending date.
If you turn on the Downloaded Posting date column you will be able to see if that is the case.

UKR

This has been discussed in several other discussions over the years.
Quicken is not aware of the case where your statement end date is on the "last day of the month" which is a variable day ranging from 28 to 31.

Other statements end on a fixed day every month, e.g., the 15th.

So, to keep it simple but not perfect, it appears to me that the programmers decided to always keep a fixed date and just advance the month by 1. Due to February being a short month and other months only having 30 days, your month end dates will always be off a little. It's been like this ever since Quicken was first created.

Adjusting the end date of a reconcile against statement balance is a simple keystroke, as mentioned before.

You want a change that really makes sense? Go out there and push the Earth into an orbit that is exactly 360 days () hrs 0 min 0 sec. Now we could finally have 12 months of exactly 30 days each. No short months, no long months. And no more leap year adjustments either. Wouldn't that be swell?

Chris_QPW

UKR said:

You want a change that really makes sense? Go out there and push the Earth into an orbit that is exactly 360 days () hrs 0 min 0 sec. Now we could finally have 12 months of exactly 30 days each. No short months, no long months. And no more leap year adjustments either. Wouldn't that be swell?

How do you deal with the ruler or politician that wants to steal a day from another month just so “his month” has the most days in it? 

Chris_QPW

Note for the programmer to do this they would in fact need input from the user.  You are entering a date for the reconcile.  One can’t just assume that because I reconciled on February 28th that next month that I will want to reconcile on the 31th.

And what would that even look like?
It is one thing to say a reminder is on the last day of the month, but the user is free to kick off reconcile any time they like.

UKR

Chris_QPW said:

Note for the programmer to do this they would in fact need input from the user.  You are entering a date for the reconcile.  One can’t just assume that because I reconciled on February 28th that next month that I will want to reconcile on the 31th.

And what would that even look like?
It is one thing to say a reminder is on the last day of the month, but the user is free to kick off reconcile any time they like.

For that one would need to add a flag byte to every account control record, something like:

"Is this statement end date

• [_] a fixed date, always the same day (1...28)
• [_] or does it always fall on the last calendar day of the month (28...31)?"

In case you're wondering ... my credit union's VISA card statement end date always falls on a fixed 28th.