account balances in reports do not match reconciled register amounts

will66pu

All three of my checking accounts show inflated balances in Quicken's net worth and account balance reports. One checking account with a reconciled balance of about $4k shows a balance of $151 k in the net worth and account balance reports. The others also have errors in the multiple thousands. The errors in the reports display over wide time periods and the error amounts change suggesting a cumulative double counting problem of some types of transactions. Jared from Quicken support responded to my June post and suggested I validate file. I did so (twice) but to no effect on this problem. I am now running Quicken version 42.19 build 27.1.4219 on Windows 10

UKR

Assuming that your account registers are correctly sorted by Date, the running Balance in your register should match the bank balance on any given day. (In a filtered register or one that is not sorted by Date, the running balance as displayed in the Balance column may be meaningless)

Recommend you carefully reconcile, i.e., compare your Quicken account register(s) to the printed bank statements and resolve any discrepancies: missing transactions, duplicate transactions, incorrect amounts, withdrawals posted as deposits or vice versa, bank fees or interest deposits not recorded. Get rid of Balance Adjustment transactions you may have recorded over time.

Go back in time until you find a month-end statement balance that matches your register balance on that date, then go forward with comparing and fixing transactions as needed, etc.

Also review the Opening Balance transaction in your register:

About the Opening Balance transaction in your register:

Make sure that the "Opening Balance" transaction in your register
- always is the oldest transaction by Date
- occurs only once in your register
- its amount matches the bank statement balance shown on that day
- if you owe money in a credit card account, the Opening Balance transaction as shown in the register must be a negative amount, e.g., $-123.45
- the transaction is marked "R"(reconciled) in the "Clr" column
- uses the same account name, surrounded by [square brackets], as Category as the account it's in (e.g., Opening Balance transaction in your MyChecking account has Category = [MyChecking]) *

If the Opening Balance isn't correct, your register balance on any given day will never match the bank's balance on the same date and your register will never reconcile correctly.

* that's called a "transfer back into the same account" and is OK. Quicken uses this method to establish the Opening Balance without making it appear as an Income or Expense in any views or reports.

will66pu

the checking account registers are sorted by date and not filtered. balances shown in the registers are reconciled to the bank's online transactions and balances at each update , so the running balance in the checking account registers and the transactions shown there are correct. the running balance shown in the registers starts to deviate from the balances shown in the account balances report in late 2013. The account balance report error is cumulative and increases over time. I have not been able to relate the report's account balance deviations to any particular transactions in the checking account register, although it seems the reports account balances increase appropriately when deposits are made to the account, but appear not to be reducing balances correctly for all transactions.

I have been a Quicken user for over 20 years, so the data file spans a much longer time period than when the account balance report deviations began in 2013 . register and report checking account balances match up until late 2013 and then deviate progressively thereafter, even though I noticed this problem only in the last couple of months.

Over time I have closed a number of accounts in the Quicken file , eg credit card accounts. The option to keep these closed accounts separate has not been checked. Payments would have been made from checking accounts to these accounts prior to their closing but this does not seem to explain the problem..

UKR

> "I have not been able to relate the report's account balance deviations to any particular transactions in the checking account register, although it seems the reports account balances increase appropriately when deposits are made to the account, but appear not to be reducing balances correctly for all transactions."

That I would like to see. Can you show us a couple of examples of where the math isn't right?

Can you please capture one or more images of the parts of your Quicken window showing the issue, sensitive information blacked out as necessary to protect your privacy but annotated to describe the situation, and attach the image(s) here?
https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7867159/faq-how-do-i-post-a-screenshot-in-the-community-from-windows

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7663259/faq-how-do-i-post-a-screenshot-in-the-community-from-a-mac

Please save images to files of file type PNG, JPG, or GIF only. They're easier to work with than PDF files.

will66pu

Two jpg files are attached. one shows the incorrect and inflated account balances shown by the account balances report for a single checking account for July. The other shows the correct transaction amounts and balances in the same checking account register from July 1 to date. The register is reconciled online. The correct register account balance at July 27 is 4273.85, which reconciles with the bank taking account of one uncleared check. Going back in the account register to the last time the account balance report and register show the same amount is in October, 2013. The deviations between the reconciled account register and account report balances becomes progressively larger thereafter. A similar account balance problem appears in two other checking accounts.

mshiggins

@will66pu do the problem accounts contain paycheck transactions? If so, you may be impacted by the paycheck corruption issue that started occurring in March. Please have a look at this discussion covering that issue:

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7912649/paycheck-corruption-problem

will66pu

a connection to a paycheck corruption issue may be plausible. I use Quicken Home and Business and create invoices with multiple line entries on each invoice The invoice suite in the program then allows separate payment for the invoice to be recorded, that payment having a linked entry to the checking account from which payment is made. The checking account entry only shows and applies the net amount from the invoice, so it seems that only the net amount could be involved in the erroneous account balance reports Quicken creates for the checking account. It seems the errors in the account balance reports are too large for these net amounts to be the sole explanation, but I will look further at this. Thanks for the tip

[Deleted User]

@will66pu - please see the attached thread.  That issue sound very similar to yours and it might help you find a solution to your issue.

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7916859/i-have-two-banking-accounts-that-overstate-the-balance-in-report#latest

will66pu

Thanks. The link you suggest refers to a corrupted data file. I can find no indication my data file is corrupted. Transactions in the affected account registers are reconciled with bank balances. File validation indicates no read errors. The only problem I can see is that account balance reports for all checking accounts in the file are incorrect and inflated.

will66pu

I have found the cause for the problem described in this post. It is the Paycheck Wizard corruption issue suggested by msHiggins. Thanks. In my case, I have used the Wizard to record paycheck deposits to track deductions. An update of that Wizard has repopulated the data contained in all past transaction entries using that Wizard with the most recent data in that WIzard. So current pay and deductions in that WIzard has been retroactively applied to all past Wizard entries, in my case those dating back to 2013. Pay and deductions certainly changed over that time, introducing a cumulative error in the WIzard's data. This bug did NOT change transactions, in this case net deposit amounts, in the account register. It simply allows a mismatch between the repopulated data in the Wizard and the account register. So any Quicken report function using the WIzard's data will be wrong. So beware if you use a Quicken report for tax purposes. It is a nasty bug in that it changed file data over multiple years and, given that it appears to be several months old, trying to restore a backup file from before the appearance of this problem is not practical. Where is Quicken Support on this?

mshiggins

Ugh, was hoping to be wrong about the cause of the issue. 

There is a lengthy discussion on the issue in this post, with a few pinned answers from Quicken moderators acknowledging the issue. 

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7909601/r39-17-r39-21-paycheck-corruption-edited/p1

To the best of my knowledge, there was no other announcement or notification to users from Quicken Inc about this issue. 

will66pu

Quicken users whose date file was corrupted by the R39.17 update would, if a backup file dating prior to the update release date (March was it?) could have, if aware of the bug, uninstalled the update and gone to the data file backup. Would have been messy, but doable, but virtually no one knew. But with the passage of time, a regular Quicken user would have accumulated too many transactions, for a long back dated backup file to be a practical form of data recovery. A manual file fix can mean, as in my case, hunting for hundreds of corrupted transactions. It seems to me that it is the user that Quicken should care about the most who would have been the most seriously affected by this bug. Many may still not be aware of the problem. I don't, in light of this, understand why Quicken appears complacent, They should have promptly withdrawn 39.17and pushed user awareness so remedial data file action could be started as quickly as possible. Apparently, Quicken support have only been reactive, not proactive. This bug should be seen by Quicken as a disaster which can undermine the franchise. How can one rely on a program whose quality control permits updates that create unrecoverable data loss? Or is it meant just to be a toy?