Quicken has screwed up my file!

AnonymousUser

I have always (for about 20 years) entered my banking information manually and reconciled manually. Today, I reconciled my Quicken account to my most recent bank statement (which closed yesterday). The account reconciled perfectly, with one outstanding payment for $205. Then, I changed the account to activate automatic downloads of banking information in the future. I had no problem doing it. When it showed me 90 days of transactions to accept, I deleted them without accepting any of them since they were already manually entered and reconciled. Suddenly, my account balance increased by $1356.37! There was no explanation of the increase. I looked back four months, and all transactions matched my bank statements. I called customer service, and their only suggestion was to restore from a backup file, which means I would lose a lot of information and have to redo it all. The only thing I can think of is that Quicken changed the beginning balance of the account (which goes back to 2005). All transactions in the account show Reconciled except for the one outstanding payment, so there are no obvious additional entries. I looked at the Reconciliation tool, and it no longer has correct dates or balances in it. Thanks a lot, Quicken.

splasher

Copy (using Windows Explorer) a backup changing the file's name and change the extension from .QDF-backup to .QDF.

Open it with Quicken and look at the opening balance in question to see if it really was changed, then fix it in your original file.

When you setup the download mechanism, it recalculated the OB based on the 90 days of downloaded transactions being different than anything in the register at the time.  I'm not excusing Quicken's process, just suggesting what probably happened.

AnonymousUser

OK, splasher, that sounds like a possibility. But it won't let me change the extension. The extension is not showing as part of the file name. I can change the file name, but the extension shows in the "type" column, and I can't change it. Am I looking at the wrong thing?

splasher

I can't explain why you can't change the extension, but I can.
Make sure that you have a fresh backup of your current file.  Then restore a previous backup, during the process, you should be able to change the file's name, but if you don't, you have the freshly made backup to restore to when you are all done.

AnonymousUser

Success! It was just as we thought: The opening balance had been changed! That is so stupid. Thank you for your help! :)

Ps56k2

AnonymousUser said: But it won't let me change the extension. The extension is not showing as part of the file name. I can change the file name, but the extension shows in the "type" column, and I can't change it. Am I looking at the wrong thing?

Did you go and change the Windows setting ...

Windows 8 and 10:

1. Open File Explorer (open any folder).
2. Click the View tab.
3. Select "[x] File name extensions."
4. Optionally, you can enable Hidden items.
5. File extensions will now be visible.

splasher

AnonymousUser said:

Success! It was just as we thought: The opening balance had been changed! That is so stupid. Thank you for your help!

You came up with the cause of the problem, I just gave you some suggestions on how to prove it.