Every day when I download and reconcile my accounts, I have to do a balance adjustment - why??

pbfan65

I download transactions and reconcile daily. For a while now, I have "mystery transactions" and have to do a balance adjustment. This week, EACH of my accounts has required a multi-thousand dollar balance adjustment EVERY DAY. This is ridiculous. I'm using quicken to be able to track expenses yet my checking account had to get a $9,000 balance adjustment yesterday and a $323 balance adjustment today.

If I'm downloading every day how can there be a $9,000 discrepancy???? And this is happening across all of my accounts every day. I'll put in the balance adjustment so it reconciles and the next day, it's off again. When it used to happen occasionally, I was willing to deal with it, but for the last year or so it's been happening more and more frequently. When I look at my register and compare it to the transactions online, there are no missing transactions (and I certainly wouldn't miss one for $9k in my checking account!!!). This is SO FRUSTRATING and totally screws up my reporting/expense tracking.

Richard Knappen

I am having the same issue with a Chase checking account, ever since the Chase communication protocol changed and after the "pending transactions" issue was supposedly fixed. I read (on this forum somewhere) to check the account's beginning balance prior to downloading, then check again after downloading ( apparently to see if the discrepancy occurs there). I've yet to do that; why would a reconciled entry change (and randomly at that)? This issue is frustrating and, frankly, absurd. I have a validated data file, and I am meticulous about credit and debit entries, having use Quicken since 1995. I've been through situations where duplicate downloads have happened when a credit or debit card changes and downloads must be updated. This current issue is not the same as that. There is still something screwy with the pending transactions being calculated (or not) into the current balance, i.e. the current balance in the register, whether a cleared or reconciled status. I've been rolling with the balance adjustments for about (3) weeks now... C'mon, Quicken, get it straightened out!

Rocket J Squirrel

Why do you reconcile every day? I have a feeling transient occurrences in your account are causing reconcile to fail.

I manually reconcile monthly against paper statements. This always works to the penny because the paper statement is dated in the past, so everything on it has settled.

Chris_QPW

A few notes.

For Chase there is a known problem with pending transactions being included in the online balance when pending transactions aren't being downloaded, which means you either need to wait until all transactions are settled or better reconcile the "statement balance" (even if this is a balance on the financial institution's website and not an actual statement balance) and not the online balance.
https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7918391/ongoing-10-20-22-chase-online-balance-including-pending-transactions

There is problem where Quicken changes the opening balance transaction amount when it shouldn't.  This has been going on for years but is more reported these days.  It usually happens only when people are resetting the connection or doing the changed over of one connection type to another.  EDIT:  Note people have suggested putting the amount of the Opening Balance transaction in the memo for that transaction in all of your accounts so that you can easily detect if it has been changed.

And for my opinion on this:

If you are putting in balance adjustments, you aren't reconciling.  Reconciling is the process of bringing your Quicken accounts into agreement with what the financial institution has (hint your financial institution doesn't have any "balance adjustments").  That means in this case finding out why you aren't reconciling instead of giving up and putting in a balance adjustment.  Without finding out the source of the problem there is no way for you to figure out what the solution or workaround would be.

Chris_QPW

Let me state this another way, you aren't supposed to reconcile the balance amount, you are supposed to reconcile that account.  If you put in a balance adjustment you have brought the two balances into agreement, but you haven't brought the two accounts into agreement.  All the transactions in them should match with the exception of transactions that have yet to be posted on the financial institution's website that are in Quicken, like a check you have sent, but hasn't been cashed yet.

In these things it is almost never the financial institution that is wrong.  Because of problems with the system of downloading and just human and program errors you can't 100% trust any part of the data in Quicken, neither the transactions nor the online balance.  You have to find out what isn't right and workaround the problem.

I wish it was different, but that is the reality of the world of Quicken.

SoupLady

Good Evening, I too am experiencing strange balances in Quicken. After checking the Bank of America (paper and electronic) statements I have accounted for the transactions accurately. I did find a few duplicate transactions but those were due to not matching and just accepting the transactions. I need to do a Balance Adjustment of several thousand dollars but after reading the comments above, I'm not sure this will fix what is ultimately a download issue. Also, I notice alot of the download transactions which are debit expenses to various vendors are coming in as American Express expenses and the Zelle transactions are coming in with just one persons name on them, even though I have a directory for Zelle set up on the Bank's website. Can anyone point me in the right direction for correcting these quirks. I have notices a steady increase of these errors since July and would like to fix them. Thank you all!

Petersocal

With the new connection method, Bank of America is updating your Opening balance on the first download. So, if you are having problems with your balance changing after downloading from Bank Of America, go to the very top of your file. See if this balance is different than you expected. Mine are all at zero since I open the accounts after I started using Quicken 1988.