Checks I've written after my bank statement date

Blue44

Why don't transactions I've made after the bank statement date and recorded in Quicken appear in my bank reconciliation?

Frankx

Hi @Blue44,

That's because they actually don't belong in the reconciliation process. 

The reconciliation of an account is the process of considering all income and payments made as of a point in time - typically a bank statement for a reconciliation of a bank account.  The process needs to include all transactions up to and including the date of the bank statement being used for the reconciliation.  Any and all transactions dated after that bank statement date have no bearing on the reconciliation and are therefore not considered.

Let me know if you have any followups.

Frankx

Blue44

Something changed then, because I'm looking at my last month's reconciliation and it reconciles to the date I reconciled. I.e., the bank statement date was 9/15/22. Included in my "uncleared transactions were checks written through September 22, the date I did the reconciliation. There's no reason whatsoever not to be able to reconcile to the current date. Up until now that's how Quicken worked and that was proper--i.e., the register records things in the order they occurred--including adjustments made at a later date.

From a practical standpoint adjustments for prior errors also need to be posted currently. If I discover an error, say, on September 22 on the 9/15/2022 recon, I need to post it currently. If I go in and try to post it as of 9/15/22 all the balances after that date change--that gets confusing if the balances after the statement date have been used in some other context.

Frankx

Hi again @Blue44

It sounds like last month you reconciled - not to the date of the bank statement, but to some date after that (likely to 9/22). 

I absolutely agree that "There's no reason whatsoever not to be able to reconcile to the current date." as long as you are using the "online balance at that date" in the reconciliation.  Your post above asked - "Why don't transactions I've made after the bank statement date and recorded in Quicken appear in my bank reconciliation?" and I answered that question.

If you use an actual bank statement date as your original post indicated - rather than the Online balance date - what I stated above is absolutely correct.

Frankx

NotACPA

To reconcile is to compare.  You're comparing your records to that provided by the bank.  Anything that happened in Q after the statement cut-off date can't possibly be compared to THIS statement ... just wait for the next statement.

Blue44

OK...gotcha....I think.
Based on what you say, I must have hit the "reconcile an account" choice right after 10/15, before I recorded several more transactions. So the reconciliation only listed transactions through that date. Had I waited for another week to reconcile it would have included those later transactions and I could have reconciled to that later date, right? So I should just go ahead and reconcile to the 10/15 date and catch up next time.

splasher

What would be the purpose of showing transactions after the statement's closing date if the only thing you are going to do to thing is to make sure that they are not marked as reconciled, "R".

They should be in either blank or "C" status and not have any bearing on the reconciliation so why clutter up the screen with things that have no bearing on the reconcile?

Blue44

So making an adjustment in the register after the closing date to correct an error is clutter?

splasher

Blue44 said:

So making an adjustment in the register after the closing date to correct an error is clutter?

Why would you make an adjustment transaction?  Why wouldn't you find out why the reconcile did not zero out?  I have never adjusted a register to make the numbers correct, I look until I find the error.

Blue44

Just druthers I guess. I don't change an erroneous transaction. I record an adjustment with an explanation. Thanks for your help;

Chris_QPW

Well, here is how I look at it.  Reconciling is bringing your Quicken accounts into agreement with the financial institutions.  That isn't just the current balance, that is every transaction.  There isn't any adjustment transaction entered into the financial institution's records, so there shouldn't be one in your transactions.  As far as I'm concerned, you didn't do a proper reconcile.

Blue44

You've never seen the financial institution make a mistake then?

Lucky you.

splasher

Blue44 said:

You've never seen the financial institution make a mistake then?

Lucky you.

I guess I'm lucky, I have never had a FI make a mistake in an amount.  Me, yes, FI no.

Chris_QPW

Blue44 said:

You've never seen the financial institution make a mistake then?

Lucky you.

Actually, not, but that would be an exception to reconciling to what they have, sort of.

First off, if this wasn't a one 40-year event I would drop the financial institution in an instant!

Second, if the financial institution was wrong, I would go to the financial institution and get them to fix the problem. Once they did that, their transactions would be updated, and I could then reconcile my Quicken account to what they did.

Blue44

A long, long time ago I did bank recs for a large institution. When thousands of checks are run through a bank account you can bet that there will be MICR encoding errors or doctored checks in maybe one out of every 500 transactions. For personal accounts you are right. The odds of such errors are infinitesimal and not worth worrying about.

Chris_QPW

Actually, I take that back I have seen a financial institution mess up, twice in 13 years that I have had 5 Lending Club accounts.  And in both cases, they corrected the problem within a week.  Investment accounts being a lot more complicated has a much higher chance of something being wrong.

Chris_QPW

BTW let's say a financial institution makes a mistake.  I would be inclined to mimic that mistake, with a memo stating that it is a mistake instead of making an adjustment.

For instance, you download a transaction that is supposed to be $100 expense and instead it is $200.
If I was pre-entering transactions (I don't but let's say I am) then I would change my manually entered transaction to $200 and put in a memo that it is wrong and that it was $100. And then I would match that to the downloaded transaction.  If I didn't pre-enter I would just do the same memo on the downloaded one.  Next, I would contact the financial institution and get them to fix it.

Fixing it is always going to be downloaded as another transaction, and in this case say a credit for $100.

Doing it this way Quicken shows exactly what happened, the amount of money in my account is always right, and if you are doing any manually matching of transactions from the Downloaded Transactions tab, this will also make sure that these transactions don't linger in that list because you have deleted instead matched to the manually entered transactions.

Chris_QPW

BTW back to the original question.  I can think of one way to get the adjustment into the old reconcile.  It relies on what I consider a bug.  Unlike uncleared/cleared transactions that have to be on or before the reconcile statement date, ALL reconciled transactions are included in the reconcile.  So, if you marked your adjustment reconciled, it would be included in the reconcile.

This bug is why you can't reconcile previous time periods before the last reconcile.