Why Does My Brokerage Account Reconciliation Shows non-zero Starting Cash Balance?

uknowdakine

I had my brokerage account for 4 months before I found out I could track it on Quicken and do online downloads. It never reconciled properly because of the missing 4 months. I decided to sit down with my paper statements and manually input all the transactions for months 1-4. When I try to reconcile the first month, I get a negative starting cash balance. From the register, the first transaction was the cash deposit. I had to tune my OCD down and let Quicken make the balance adjustment for the first month. After reconciling months 2 and 3 successfully, month 4 has another discrepancy with the cash balance. I went through all four months against the paper statements and there are no errors or omissions. Help!!

Chris_QPW

One possibility is that you have reconciled transactions past the ending date of your reconcile.

Quicken will include ALL reconciled transactions in the register during a reconcile no matter what you use for the ending date of the reconcile.  On the other hand Quicken will only use the cleared/uncleared transactions that are on or before the reconcile end date.

I believe this handling of the reconciled transactions is a bug, but they have left it like the forever.

The end result is that you can't reconcile a past timeframe without first unreconciling any timeframe after it.

It use to be extremely painful to "unreconcile" since it had to be down one transaction at a time, but luckily not to long ago they added a function where you can set multiple transaction's reconcile status at once.

Select the gear icon at the top right of the register, and then Edit Multiple Transactions.
From there you should be able to select all the transactions and then Mark Cleared (c), and then you should be able to start your reconcile from the beginning month.