Account Balances / Networth Incorrect

AllenW

Hi everyone,

Long time user (1999), first time poster.

I am having the same issues as this specific post about networth report account balances incorrect:
https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7910876/networth-report-account-balances-are-incorrect

The issue is likely the paycheck corruption issue (as it only affects the specific account where I'm using the Paycheck Wizard):
https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7912649/paycheck-corruption-problem

No other accounts are affected.

The resolution from that thread was to restore a backup from a previous version, then update to the patched version.

Unfortunately, that was a year ago.

I typically don't check reporting all that often so I didn't catch that corruption issue last year. If the running account balance and the account bar look correct, I just keep going.

A lot of the accounts from the paycheck deductions were marked closed within Quicken. (I honestly didn't think I'd be transacting on an old 401(k) from 10 years ago).

Manual attempts at correcting a paycheck result in really wonky results (I end up restoring from a recent backup because I couldn't figure out why it was doing what it was doing).

I spent an hour with support and we did the following:
- check that I'm running the latest version of Quicken
- ran OSU
- disabled the firewall and then ran OSU
- checked that Windows Updates were applied
- deactivated and re-activated Online Services of the affected account and ran OSU
- given general instructions on how to customize my account balance/networth reports to resolve this

No other troubleshooting steps were provided.

The specific account has transactions going back to 2008, so it's a bit.

Any thoughts on how I can get this working again?

NotACPA

@allenw,

What  BUILD of  Q are you running?  Do HELP, About Quicken for this info.

And, have you seen the alert about R46 losing split lines after line 10?  Could this be your issue?

AllenW

@NotACPA

I'm running R46.12, Build 27.1.46.12.

Looking at my paycheck, I see 16 lines, but it's a split created with paycheck wizard, not manual split.

I saw the alert and it appears to be for manual split lines and not the paycheck one.

As a part of troubleshooting, I did a custom report on the first month of the account history with various paychecks, deposits, withdraws and transfers and the amount is definitely off even with a small set of transactions. The only complicated transactions in that set are the paychecks.

NotACPA

The Paycheck Wizard is simply a fancy front end for what is actually a split transaction.

SO, you're impacted by that bug also.

I'd suggest following the alert to keep being updated on it.

AllenW

@NotACPA

Hopefully that's all it is, I'd really hate to try and re-enter a year's worth of transactions.

The alert I'm following (for those in the future reading this):
https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7927815/new-1-17-23-categories-disappearing-in-split-transactions/

mshiggins

@AllenW roll back to a 44.xx version, restore a backup that hasn't been opened with 46.xx version. If you see the same corruption then, you have the March 2022 paycheck corruption issue. If you no longer see the corruption, then you have the 46.xx issue.

AllenW

@mshiggins I wasn't sure how to roll back to 44.xx, so I installed 44.28 in a VM.

Loaded my oldest backup from Nov 2022 (looks like I updated to 45.13 mid Dec 2022).

Still have the same issue: reports for networth and account balances are off for that specific account. Account Overview is incorrect, but the ledger and account bar balances are all correct.

Looks like I have the March 2022 paycheck corruption.

Reading about the other paycheck corruption threads, I see others are catching it late as well:
https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7914616/paycheck-corruption-issue-erroneous-reporting-totals
https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7912649/paycheck-corruption-problem
https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7916295/old-paychecks-corrupted-last-march-just-noticed-today-edited
https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7921378/correcting-paycheck-split-corruption-issue-un-categorized-transactions-from-march
https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20326344

I thought I could be tricky by doing a QIF export/import, but the imported results are even worse. It's adding current paycheck information, inserting those as the old paychecks and then adding an extra split line to match the paycheck total match that transaction entry (which is still incorrect).

I did find a backup from 07/2021.

I'll update once I have this figured out a bit more.

AllenW

So I ended up doing a restore from the 07/2021 backup.

Then I did a transaction-only export of the affected time range.

I ended up just deleting improperly imported transactions and then slowly matched it all up.

Fortunately having the VM with Quicken installed made this easier to compare, but it was still a bear since not all the splits came over.

Sounds like I need to work on my backup plan for Quicken.

Before closing this out, does anyone have a good backup retention policy for Quicken that they've used with some success?

I'm also wondering if there's better data hygiene than keep all transactions from the beginning of time.

mshiggins

I keep weekly backups. After the weeklies accumulate, they get manually whittled down to monthly. After the monthlies accumulate, they get manually whittled down to yearly.  

After having once having to roll back to a 3 year old backup and rebuild, I feel better having a large date range of backups I can use if needed. 

No plans to remove any of the 24 years worth of data from my file. Once data is split off or removed, it’s almost impossible to combine again. 

Since I am running an unsupported version that could suddenly stop working, I do have a disaster recovery plan that includes exporting all my Quicken data to QIF or Excel, so I will have access to my data should anything happen to my file or otherwise makes Quicken unusable. 

AllenW

Thanks @mshiggins!

I got all my data restored. It could have been worse but could have a been a whole lot better.

Things are good to go and this can be marked closed.