Quicken changes opening balance for no reason and without a notice

Bob@45

Fortunately I ALWAYS use zero as my starting balance. After experiencing this three times on different accounts (fortunately all with zero starting balance), I went through my oldest accounts that didn't have a zero, modified their starting balances to be "balance adjustment" records instead, and added Starting Balance records with the previous date. I've now developed the habit that if my account does not reconcile and there's no obvious reason for it, I jump up to the starting balance record. This is the cause about once out of every three reconciliation issues.

cmumathwhiz

That is a great idea!

pjmartin1121

I don't understand what everyone is doing to fix this. My opening balance in 2015 is zero. My account balanced just fine last month. Now this month all my payments and deposits match up yet the difference between the cleared balance and statement ending balance is $17,816.15. How is this even possible? What the heck do I do to fix it????

Bob@45

I've run into similar issues.  I have one (fortunately inactive) savings account that I emptied in May 2021. The register pages show zero balance. There is no pending activity for the account. But Projected Balances shows a negative balance around -2500, and monthly activity pushing the account even more negative every month. When I click on the transaction dot on the graph, it says "Nothing scheduled for this period". 

I did run into this a while back with an active account, and the only thing that Quicken support could tell me was restore from a backup that didn't have the problem" or "delete transactions from your register from most recent to older transactions until the problem goes away, and then recreate those transactions." There's garbage in the register transaction records that are invisible to us, even invisible to Quicken support, and that is not fixed by a validate or even super validate. The only "solution" is to delete the corrupted data record and recreate it. And since there's no way to know which record is the issue, we need to go back transaction by transaction until the problem goes away. 

pjmartin1121

I found what my problem was. Hope this helps someone else. In my Savings account I found 2 duplicate transactions that were added to my register. Both were in 2019. In my Checking account I found 5 duplicate transactions that were between 10/20 and 01/21. I was still $.07 off, but just did a balance adjustment. I wasn't going to spend any more time looking for pennies. These accounts balanced fine at the end of July, but were off when I tried to balance at the end of August. How these transactions got added in the past month is beyond me. Quicken needs to find the bug so this doesn't happen to anyone again. I've used Quicken for many, many years and have never seen this before.

SandyD

Quicken has still not fixed this problem. It only happens to me when I have to disable and then re-enable download for some reason, not on routine downloads. My first work-around was to print registers to pdfs. Only took a minute and they are small files and I can go back to any date and see if a balance has changed in order to find an error. I have since entered an opening balance amount in memo line for every account.

But the fundamental problem is that I no longer trust Quicken.

namefunnel

It is October. I brought up Quicken on a new machine, started import, was informed that 3 bank accounts had a new download method. OK, I agreed to try it, imported Bank of America, and the balance of my account went highly negative and wrong. The culprit, as noted above, is that the initial balance got changed to a huge amount. How can a bug like this remain in an accounting package since at least May??? Now I can't trust the software to add numbers correctly. Isn't Intuit testing software before releases? Don't they send the software developers into overdrive to fix critical bugs like this? Don't they care about this product? Now I have to start worrying that the tax programs (TurboTax and Lacerte) might also be insufficiently tested and maintained.

namefunnel

(Never mind the comment about the tax programs - I keep forgetting that Quicken is now a separate private equity backed company and not Intuit)

BillyL

Just encountered the same problem as everyone else (initial balance changed). It happened after the latest update that got pushed around 9/30. After that, transaction downloads no longer worked, so I contacted support. I followed their script to disconnect my BofA accounts, then re-connect them and then do a validate on the account that I wanted to download transactions to. I think it was the step of validating the one BofA account that caused my initial balance to get modified. Following the validation process I was presented with a DATA_LOG.txt file that indicated that the validation had modified the file. I didn't pay too much attention to that, but I probably should have. It was only the next day when I discovered that initial balance "bug". I compared the initial balance to that of a backup copy and just fixed the initial balance and put that number in the memo field so if I have to do it again it will be easier. The problem now is that I no longer trust Quicken at all. How can an accounting package that has been on the market for over 30 years be so screwed up. Doesn't Quicken have automated tests that are supposed to catch this type of issue? Other threads mention that the issue was fixed back in March. Well, it has not. I saw the popup dialog that indicated that "Pending Transaction download and display is being temporarily turned off" - Hopefully turning this feature off will make Quicken stop updating initial balances long enough for Quicken to fix the initial balance bug.

BEEdwards66

Validation would have not found issue. It has never found issues with this problem as the downloading process doesn't corrupt the file, it just puts bad data into it. That said, I have found a number of problems around cost basis (which I would file a bug on if they let me). When I have reported it, they say to delete the entries and (or start with a new file). The validation process that is built into Quicken either isn't stringent enough so that it doesn't detect all of the file corruption, or they don't know what is wrong and they just want you to make the problem go away and stop complaining. It is unconscionable that they don't have a user bug reporting process and instead direct people to the "community" for problems like that.

jvkfamily

Hi, I've experienced my opening balance going missing repeatedly. The first time I manually reconciled all the way back to the beginning to find it. Now, when my Online Balance doesn't match my Ending Balance I know to check this first. I have sync turned off because unfortunately it seemed to cause problems. I also now have disabled transactions from automatically posting to the register because occasionally manually entered splits would be overwritten. It makes me nervous to continue using Quicken. I have saved backups if support wants to see this. Unfortunately I need to choose login as a different user before restoring the backups because even though sync is off it will update data from the web when I restore from backup.

info@rhomestead.com

Happened with Community Bank NA on my checking account. Opening balance from 2007 so no way to go back and find what it should be. I assume it is the opening balance issue since the opening balance is $800 and some and the first entry is $4000 and some so all the way it should negative balance.

And I DON"T like that Quicken isn't keeping backups. I am not sold on having everything on the cloud. I operated assuming everything is on my computer and I tell it when to make a cloud backup. Not just Quicken though, Dropbox, Box, etc has changed and I don't like it.

Jim_Harman

Quicken creates a backup just before installing each update. Look for the BACKUP folder in the same folder where your data files is stored (normally Documents\Quicken). There should be a bunch of files there that look like
<your data file name>-R-43.32-2022-10-15.QDF-backup 

The R-XX.YY is the previous Quicken version and the YYYY-MM-DD is the date you installed the update. There may be other files as well, which would be automatic backups created when you exit Quicken.

Bob@45

So yes, your backups are on your computer. In Quicken, File > Restore from Backup File should automatically provide you with a list of "recent" backups. I suggest 1) take a manual backup of your Quicken file (I do this daily regardless, since Quicken has problems several times a year), 2) Restore from a recent backup that predates your opening balance problem. Check what the correct opening balance is. 3) Reopen your current file, and correct your opening balance. 4) Change that opening balance record to something like "opening balance deposit" and change the category to something like "bookkeeping" so it no longer looks like an opening balance record. 5) Create a new Opening Balance record with a date one day prior to your now-first transaction, with an opening balance of zero. Next time this account gets hit, you know the opening balance needs to be zero. You can then repeat steps 4-5 on any other accounts with non-zero opening balances.

splasher

Jim_Harman said:

Quicken creates a backup just before installing each update. Look for the BACKUP folder in the same folder where your data files is stored (normally Documents\Quicken). There should be a bunch of files there that look like
<your data file name>-R-43.32-2022-10-15.QDF-backup 

The R-XX.YY is the previous Quicken version and the YYYY-MM-DD is the date you installed the update. There may be other files as well, which would be automatic backups created when you exit Quicken.

The pre-update backup only happens if the update happens from within Quicken.  If a user downloads the mondo patch release and use it to do the update, the backup is not performed.

Ovidiu

Same issue. I had to go back to backups to prove I wasn't dreaming this up.
It's mind-blowing how the Quicken team manages to mess up this much

blubblub

Same problem - suddenly an Open Balance on a Chase checking account of $35,677.34, with the bizarre Opening Balance date of "7/19/2079” - 57 years in the future.

Restoring backups I see that it happened sometime between a backup “43.20-2022-09-17” (where the mysterious entry does not exist) and “43.20-2022-09-20” (where it does exist).

This is terrifying. What other random entries are happening that we don’t know about?

blubblub

A possibly useful tip: I just did a search for "opening balance" and the search results show at least one other account that has a random "opening balance" entry in an account I know started with a zero opening balance. But the terror still remains about what other random entries might exist.

svanderploeg

The comments on this post are fairly old and do not seem to be related to the change to Express Web Connect+. I have not had the opening balance issue until my Chase accounts and my Bank of American accounts went to EWC+. Easier to find in Chase because my original Opening Balance was zero. But I started Quicken long after opening my Bank of America account so its difficult to know the amount it changed. I've downloaded BofA almost daily since the switch to ECW+ without this problem happening. Then a few days ago, my Quicken balance and online balance was off by almost $4K. Can not find ANY other reason so I have to assume Quicken changed the opening balance FOR NO REASON. Appears to be random. What is going on Quicken. Don't really want your standard answer about no answer and no estimated time to fix.

Jim_Harman

@svanderploeg what many of us have done is to add a Memo to the opening balance transaction noting what the correct balance should be. That way you can easily see if it was changed. 

svanderploeg

Thank you. I'm going to do that. Still angry that Quicken is not fixing the issue.

Bob@45

> what many of us have done is to add a Memo to the opening balance transaction noting what the correct balance should be. That way you can really see if it was changed. 
My method is to modify the true opening balance record to a "bookkeeping" entry, and create a new opening balance record for the prior date with a zero balance. That way it's very obvious when it happens, and the correction is always change that earliest record back to zero. 

Geobrick

I've had this issue as well and at those times it was easy to change the opening balance back to zero (or whatever it was supposed to be). But now Quicken has changed an opening balance in a checking account with an amount that's a transfer from an old mortgage account. I can't delete or change the transaction because I need to do that from the matching transaction. When I select "go to matching transaction", it's not there. There are no transactions within 10 years of the so-called matching transaction. Now I'm stuck with that opening balance transaction. The only fix would be to add a dummy transaction with an amount that offsets the fake opening balance.

splasher

Geobrick said:

I've had this issue as well and at those times it was easy to change the opening balance back to zero (or whatever it was supposed to be). But now Quicken has changed an opening balance in a checking account with an amount that's a transfer from an old mortgage account. I can't delete or change the transaction because I need to do that from the matching transaction. When I select "go to matching transaction", it's not there. There are no transactions within 10 years of the so-called matching transaction. Now I'm stuck with that opening balance transaction. The only fix would be to add a dummy transaction with an amount that offsets the fake opening balance.

Well, that is a new wrinkle to this screwed up issue of changing opening balances that I haven't heard before.
Do you possibly have a recent backup you can revert to? 

mikek753b

as all of you see this is very bad issue that impacts so many, while we don't see any Quicken attempt to fix it for so long
worst part that impacts anyone who a must to do manual import of transactions due to online update isn't working, like current 2 months PenFed issues
each such import comes with the opening balance, that Quicken behind our backs updates opening account balance to that strange value, causing tons of issues and pain to revert it back

many have accounts over an year old, those import transactions 99% within past 1 month, so there is no idea about correct and original account balance at all, but for the start date for that import only

I just don't understand, why Quicken makes changes to R transaction type without asking User

I've lost so much time for this already that diminish usefulness of paid tool that should save User time.

what paid User need to do to get this issues fixed?
yes, I opened several support cases, but those are black holes, we don't get any ticket number or tracking ability.
what else we can do?

Bob@45

This morning's OSU told me there was an update for Quicken, and when I looked at the contents of the pending update, it claimed to include a fix for this issue. I'll wait a few weeks before I apply the update, but maybe the resolution is near...

mikek753b

> @Bob@45 said:
> This morning's OSU told me there was an update for Quicken, and when I looked at the contents of the pending update, it claimed to include a fix for this issue. I'll wait a few weeks before I apply the update, but maybe the resolution is near...

would you provide the link and the quote for the fix? please
somehow I can't see it at https://www.quicken.com/support/quicken-windows-release-notes

tnx

splasher

@mikek753b

There is R45.11 in Staged Release at this time

mikek753b

thank you
this is in today https://www.quicken.com/support/update-and-patch-20182019-release-quicken-windows-subscription-product Mondo update
a bit misleading, but it's there

"For some customers, Quicken incorrectly updated the opening balance transaction automatically when an existing account was reconnected."

yes, I got this R45.11 is installed and will monitor with a hope to not see this issue any more ;-)
so finally this thread can be closed

SandraStowell

I have R45.13, Quicken for Windows, Windows 11.
My CU account opening balance was just changed!! Aargh!