Reconciliation math error

dmwexler

Reconciliation against a bank monthly statement produces false discrepancies. Beginning balance taken from bank statement. Payments and deposits agree with bank. But, end balance computation by Quicken Mac gives wrong number and then inserts adjustment. Happened for June and July this year.

Jon

Transactions at the end of the month can cause issues. If you have a transaction in the register dated on the 1st that actually posts to your account a day early, it can throw off the result because the transaction will be on your statement but Quicken won't include it in the reconciliation. Happens to me with my pension payment almost every month. I wind up having to add an extra day when reconciling to get everything to balance.

If that doesn't help, then go through the statement one transaction at a time & verify each transaction is present in Quicken, and that there are no extra transactions in Quicken that are not on your statement. I've had to do that once or twice, but in the end I was able to get everything back on track without having any bogus "adjustment" transactions.

jacobs

@dmwexler Quicken isn't making an error in its reconciliation math, but as @Jon suggests above, something is off between what's entered in Quicken and what your bank is reporting. I know it's easy to think that Quicken is doing the math wrong if your reconciliation is off, but if you start from the opposite premise — that Quicken is just doing simple math to add up all the transactions, and that it doesn't make a math error doing so — then by process of elimination, you'll uncover where the actual discrepancy arises. 

You said "beginning balance taken from bank statement." I'd note that if you are reconciling to a bank statement, then it's not necessary to enter a beginning balance at all, only the ending balance and closing date. You didn't mention if you are using the bank statement for your ending balance. If you're having issues with Quicken entering adjustments, I'm wondering if you are reconciling to an online balance from your bank rather than to a month-end bank statement? The online balance reported by some banks may include pending transactions which have not yet posted and downloaded to Quicken — something they shouldn't do — and therefore result in a discrepancy between the reported balance and Quicken's balance. 

To get to the bottom of things, I'd suggest that you do a few reconciliations using only the bank statement ending balance to see if everything is in order. Since you've already reconciled June and July and had problems, if those weren't done from a bank statement, I'd suggest re-reconciling each of those months using the bank statement ending balance and date. Or you can just do it going forward. Don't reconcile to an online balance; reconcile to the statement. And make sure the items checked off in the reconciliation exactly match the bank statement. I think you'll find that doing it this way, things will work correctly. After that, if you prefer to go back to reconciling to an online balance, because you want to reconcile more frequently than monthly, you'll just need to be on the lookout for pending transactions which may be included in the bank's balance but are not yet entered in Quicken.

Personally, I'd find checking the bank's website for pending transactions or trying to figure out what transaction might be in the bank balance but not in Quicken to be too much extra work. I've always been content with reconciling my bank accounts (and credit card accounts) monthly between Quicken and the monthly statement.

Or, as Jon describes, there might be a date mismatch between a transaction date and a posted date, where you're seeing the transaction date but Quicken's reconciliation uses the posted date. If you find it's just a transaction that's posted a day later than the displayed date (which you can see by clicking the transaction and opening View > Show Inspector to see the posted date), the simple solution is often to just enter the reconciliation date in Quicken as one day later than the bank statement date, so Quicken will include in the transaction window that extra transaction posted a day later.

Please post back if any of this isn't clear. 

watkincm@

This is happening to me too. I have been reconciling my bank/credit card statements for years without any problems. This month my credit card statement will not reconcile - I have checked and double checked, validated every transaction many times, but still ended up with a balance adjustment to finish the reconciliation. I know, I know, it's usually something simple and stupid but this one has me stumped.