Why is the net worth report showing incorrect balances?

Not Now John

My checking account is below $10k, however the net worth and balances report shows $235k+. I am on 45.21 build 27.1.45.21.

NotACPA

When was the last time that you reconciled your checking account?  Did it actually reconcile ... or did you allow Q to make adjustments?

You might need to review your bank statements going back to when they and Q agree by date and amount and re-reconcile everything, month-by-month, since then.

Not Now John

It reconciles automatically to the online balance each time I update. It has never been out of balance.

AfricanSwallow

I discovered the same thing. I don't know the cause yet.

What I did was to run the NWR with different dates to figure out when the NWR balance didn't match the checking account balance in the left column (which had always been correct). It turns out that things started going wrong on the very date that a specific paycheck first started. In that paycheck, I noticed that the 401k deduction wasn't right - it had no category (401K account in the category field). It was odd that that account wasn't there - I wouldn't miss something like that? So I just plugged in the 401k account, hit enter, and saved the transaction (Quicken didn't complain that it was a reconciled transaction, which was weird). I found that there were more transactions like that. The most recent transactions seemed to be fine. So I continued "correcting" the old ones, or so I thought, keep reading...

So at this point, I'm correcting "an" error (missing category values), but not necessarily "the" error (a single incorrect account balance in the Net Worth Report).

I noticed that the balance in the 401k account was increasing, as it should... It had heretofore been accurate to the penny. I decided to stop updating transactions in the checking account and take a look at the 401k account. It turns out I had made adjustments early on in the life of the 401k account and "added" various numbers of different stocks/MFs... So it all seemed to make sense - I must not have been tracking that 401k account from the very beginning (been downloading transactions from the fund manager, etc.) and all I would have to do after fixing the paychecks would be to alter or even just delete the large adjustments in the 401k account. All made sense so far...

I went back to correcting missing categories. After I'd done a few dozen, I noticed something odd. A paycheck transaction of interest displayed a net deposit in the transaction register - let's say $1000. When looking at the split detail - the values there did not add up to $1000! After adjusting the missing category (401k account), and saving the transaction, the new net value CHANGED (increased) to say, $1400. WOAH SOMETHING ISN'T RIGHT. It turns out that when displaying the split details, it was displaying incorrect values! PANIC. It was at this point that I did a validate and a supervalidate - no problems. I have yet to determine where the "new" split values came from - they didn't even match the current ones! HOLY COW.

Bottom line - correcting the missing category caused the balance in the checking account to start increasing. ??????? The net checking deposits should never have changed!!!

I decided to see if I could get the actual net checking deposit amounts from the bank. NO!!!! The problem transactions were as old as 2014, and they don't go back that far online. AAAAAAAAGHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Now I definitely have a problem - incorrect transactions for which I don't have ANY correct data. (I don't save all the paystubs, or checking/savings account statements... looks like some adjustment transactions are in my future - and I absolutely HATE doing that...)

I reloaded a backup to see if I could learn anything... and the problem was there, too. I reloaded a backup from September 2022 - the problem is there too! WTH... It must be code, or the data is somehow corrupted.

So at this point I requested paper copies of all the paychecks, from the employer, from the beginning (2014). And I stopped using Quicken. Didn't absolutely have to use Quicken, we were up-to-date, nothing major to deal until after New Years. Then the printed paystub data arrived on 12/29. And - lo and behold - at this point Quicken will not even run. It takes the file password and just clocks. So I have ANOTHER post for that...

But I decided to post all of this here in case it's useful to anyone.

Bottom line - be leery of fixing anything related to the Net Worth Report, or old transactions in general. At this point, if you're going to attempt that, I would make a backup of your current data FIRST, maybe even print all your accounts to PDF files (with the split details!).

I suspect a recent program update is the problem. I can't prove that because I don't have the prior versions of the program to test with. Hopefully, the data isn't corrupted. This could be compounded further by the fact that Quicken seems to update the data file to make use of new features/fix problems.

The Net Worth Report has always showed correct balances - until maybe a year ago - with the only incorrect balance being for the checking account I mentioned in the train wreck above - like over $100,000 too much! All other balances are/have been correct to the penny. It was the only issue I had with Quicken, and I've ignored it because I could get the accurate value very easily.

One other event that might be germane:

Sometime in December, I ran a validate, and it reported that there were some transactions referencing a deleted account, and that the affected transactions were corrected. But I hadn't deleted any accounts. And the report didn't list any transactions. Everything seemed to be correct, except for the one account balance as reported by the NWR.

mshiggins

@AfricanSwallow
It sounds like you are experiencing the paycheck corruption issue that started occurring in March 2022.  Please have a look at this discussion covering that issue:

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

AfricanSwallow

As I feared.

mshiggins

AfricanSwallow said:

As I feared.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news :-(