Chase Import - missing transactions, very out of date charges

OvernightMadness

Hi all, new to quicken, just got everything set up and stumbled across a pretty seemingly huge issue. I'm coming over from YNAB so some learning curve but not so bad.

I got all my accounts set up and they're downloading from their respective sites which is great. But it being mid April (when I did this) it only grabbed the data back to mid January. I wanted the data back to the beginning of the year so I went to each respective site and downloaded the OFX files associated with the period and imported them. I categorized everything and altered the opening balances as necessary and all seemed good.

I got into doing some reports and noticed a very big purchase that I know I had in January was missing from my Chase account. I download the CSV file and open it up side by side with Quicken and go line by line through January. A total of 11 charges are missing from Quicken. No, this isn't a date function having to do with some landing before 1/1/22... these are from 1/3, 1/10, 1/13, 1/15 etc. Just... missing.

As a test I started a new YNAB account and imported the same file into YNAB and they're all present. What gives?

Also, yesterday Quicken shows a charge on 4/23/22 for a ski resort we last attended in the beginning of March. Chase site doesn't show it. I updated the account a few times to see if it would correct and it didn't. I search Chase for the charge and lo and behold it was in early march but again, quicken doesn't show it then. Chase does. YNAB does. Doesn't inspire confidence.

Is this a thing with Quicken? I'm coming from YNAB because YNAB is pretty limited in automation and reporting. But I'll take accurate but limited over wildly inaccurate every time. The question is am I going to have to go through all my accounts line by line to see if everything imported correctly? Unfortunately I think I know the answer to that.

Chris_QPW

What I would do is first check to see if the charges are in the QFX file.
It is a text file.  I might be a bit hard to read, but you can search for the missing payment payee names (or maybe another payee just before it and get to the right section and I think you can figure out if the charge is in there or not.

From there we should be able to know if this is a Chase or a Quicken problem.

EDIT:  As far as knowing if your records are correct or not, that is what doing a proper reconcile can determine.  Reconciling is the process of checking to make sure your Quicken register and your financial institution's records are the same.

OvernightMadness

I'll open up the QFX file in notepad and see if there's some difference to them but the fact that the charges populated in YNAB from the exact same file tells me they're present. I guess a reconcile is in order.

Chris_QPW

Oh, I didn't know that you were using the QFX file in YNAB, if that was the case, then yes it does sound like there was some problem with Quicken not importing it correctly (provided there isn't some kind of syntax error in it that YNAB ignored).

OvernightMadness

I just checked the file in notepad and the charges are there. The one in the middle (below) is the one that tipped me off to this issue because it was missing. The one's on either side of it are present. I don't see any discernable difference between these 11 missing charges and the others.

<STMTTRN>
<TRNTYPE>DEBIT
<DTPOSTED>20220105120000[0:GMT]
<TRNAMT>-175.00
<FITID>2022010524492152004637333256666
<NAME>JUNILEARNING.COM
</STMTTRN>
<STMTTRN>
<TRNTYPE>DEBIT
<DTPOSTED>20220105120000[0:GMT]
<TRNAMT>-3333.00
<FITID>2022010524510722004100003415177
<NAME>IN *JL V
</STMTTRN>
<STMTTRN>
<TRNTYPE>DEBIT
<DTPOSTED>20220105120000[0:GMT]
<TRNAMT>-10.76
<FITID>2022010524034542004000281706371
<NAME>7-ELEVEN 34523

Also did an auto reconciliation and it didn't check-mark these charges I added back in (which are present in the file). Which means it would have missed them again. And FYI, it does put a check-mark against the totally erroneously month dated charge mentioned in the original post. Which I think means I have to do this with statements by hand... <sigh>.

Chris_QPW

Well, I don't see anything wrong with that transaction, Quicken should have imported it.

When you say "auto reconciliation" are you talking about the automatic reconciling after a download?
There are some confusing terms here.

There is reconciling to the "statement balance" (which could actually be a balance one looks up on the financial institution's website). You get a dialog for the ending balance, and then the reconcile dialog.
There is reconciling to the online balance.  You get the same dialogs, but select online balance.
There is reconciling to the online balance and not ask if you want to do it differently.  You don't get the first dialog, but you get the reconcile dialog.
There is automatic reconciling to the online balance after downloading transactions, and if the reconcile balances, don't even show the user the reconcile dialog.

First dialog:

Reconcile dialog:


As you can see "uncleared" aren't "missing", they aren't included in the balance, but the assumption here is that if the Statement ending balance is correct and any of the "uncleared" transactions should be in it, then then you would have a difference until you selected them (which marks them cleared).

Note Quicken has two modes for importing transactions, one is automatic transaction entry mode, and the other goes through a Downloaded Transactions tab.  Here is with that the automatic transaction entry mode on for banking accounts.


In this mode you should never use automatic reconcile.


The reason is because you need to review the downloaded transactions to make sure that the categories and payees are all correct.  When you download in this mode the status of these transactions will be New or New Match, and you can click on the status to mark it reviewed.

Reconcile on the other hand only looks at the amounts, but it will clear these status indications if it balances.

If you have the Automatically add to banking registers mode off, then the transactions go into a Downloaded transactions tab at the bottom of the register, and you accept them one at a time into the register.  As such you are reviewing the categories and payees as you do that.  And once that is done is when the automatic categorization kicks in.

One last thing to mention.  The ending statement date used determines what uncleared and cleared transactions are included in the reconcile (their posting date has to be on or before the statement ending date).  But even future dated reconciled transactions are included in the Cleared balance calculation.  For this reason, you can't reconcile past intervals if you have already reconciled a newer time frame.

You have to always reconcile from the past to the present.