My bank download has changed the opening balance. Difference is constant and goes back 5 years.

tony31

How do I find the difference? January 2023 Book balance is bigger than Bank balance. Goes back more than five years. Difference is constant. (January had for this account duplicate transactions downloaded which I manually deleted.)

Frankx

Hi again @tony31

You said/asked " I have no idea if the January duplicate transactions are part of my problem. If they are why would my opening balance be changed?".  The answer is "yes" the duplicate transactions are a key part of the problem.  And they are also likely the reason that your opening balance was adjusted by the Quicken app.  

I had asked you if you recently disconnected the account, or otherwise reset the connection, for some reason, however you did not answer that question.  But is is apparent that you did one of those things, and Quicken then "adjusted" the account's opening balance as a way to get your current balance to agree to the recently downloaded online balance.  Quicken's adjusting of the opening balance is, in my view, a flaw in the application.  It is a short-cut that will potentially cause other problems to be hidden, and render account transactions & related account balances to be incorrect. A lot of users will therefore enter a "memo" notation in the "Memo" field of the first transaction in every account of the "amount" and the "date" of that account's opening balance.  By doing so, it is easy to know whether Quicken changed the opening balance and therefore change the opening balance back to the correct amount.

That being said, the fix for you would be to change the account's opening balance to the correct one and then delete the unexplained miscellaneous expense.  If you do not know the correct opening balance, you should still delete the miscellaneous expense and then change the opening balance to make the ending balance correct.

Frankx 

Frankx

Hi @tony31,

I have to assume that you did not record that correct opening balance anywhere.  If that is the case, from what you've told us in your post, it is likely that the amount of the beginning balance needs to be adjusted by the total of the "duplicate transactions" that were downloaded - and which you deleted.  

The easiest way to determine the amount of the "correct" opening balance is to take the total of the duplicate transactions and adjust the current opening balance by that total.

Let me know if you have any followups and/or how that goes.

Frankx

tony31

My bank balance at December 31 agreed to quicken balance. Reconciling the January 31 2023 the quicken opening balance has changed and is more than the bank. Unfortunately I cannot reconstruct the duplicate January transactions I eliminated to see if they make up the difference. But why would quicken change the opening balance and the constant difference goes back at least five years?

Frankx

Hi again @tony31

So, are you saying that nothing unusual happened between December 31 and today - for example, this account was disconnected from downloading for some time frame, or you had to revert to a backup datafile, or you had to some other event?  Please explain - if you were using Quicken as usual with no out-of-the ordinary issues or problems occurring - why you are now reporting this change in the account's opening balance.  What happened that caused the "duplicate transactions" in January?

Frankx

tony31

I download and reconcile my bank and credit card accounts on a monthly basis. All reconciled at end of December. At end of January in the monthly download I had some duplicate current quicken entries on one bank account download. I deleted the duplicates and then noticed that the ending balance did not agree with the bank balance and the difference was in the opening balance which had changed and went back at least five years. I have no idea if the January duplicate transactions are part of my problem. If they are why would my opening balance be changed? Now my accounts have a large unexplained miscellaneous expense to balance with the bank account.

Frankx

Hi again @tony31

You said/asked " I have no idea if the January duplicate transactions are part of my problem. If they are why would my opening balance be changed?".  The answer is "yes" the duplicate transactions are a key part of the problem.  And they are also likely the reason that your opening balance was adjusted by the Quicken app.  

I had asked you if you recently disconnected the account, or otherwise reset the connection, for some reason, however you did not answer that question.  But is is apparent that you did one of those things, and Quicken then "adjusted" the account's opening balance as a way to get your current balance to agree to the recently downloaded online balance.  Quicken's adjusting of the opening balance is, in my view, a flaw in the application.  It is a short-cut that will potentially cause other problems to be hidden, and render account transactions & related account balances to be incorrect. A lot of users will therefore enter a "memo" notation in the "Memo" field of the first transaction in every account of the "amount" and the "date" of that account's opening balance.  By doing so, it is easy to know whether Quicken changed the opening balance and therefore change the opening balance back to the correct amount.

That being said, the fix for you would be to change the account's opening balance to the correct one and then delete the unexplained miscellaneous expense.  If you do not know the correct opening balance, you should still delete the miscellaneous expense and then change the opening balance to make the ending balance correct.

Frankx 

tony31

No I did not disconnect the account or reset the account in my download.all other bank accounts downloaded properly. Although the account with the duplicate transactions was the first to download. Thanks for your help I will adjust the opening balance back ten years! Why quicken thought it should make an adjustment is beyond my comprehension and a massive waste of my time.

q_lurker

Why quicken thought it should make an adjustment is beyond my comprehension and a massive waste of my time.

Quicken 'thought' no such thing.  It is a bug in either the download process or the program update process.  Not clear to me which.

Are you having or letting the program automatically update itself?  I suspect in January, you also got a program update.  What release are you currently running?  (See Help / About Quicken)

tony31

Quicken deluxe, Canadian edition version R45.18 ( have used quicken continuously since 1995)

TTSguy

It's all irrelevant! I just went through similar issues. This is all still a problem that introduced itself when sync entered the picture. Take away the sync that Quicken does. Sync is like a box of chocolates, open it up and you never know what you're gonna get thereafter. The point is if this was never a problem before Quicke created sync, but is is now. Been a problem for a long time and Quicken has never figured out why in order to fix it. All we get is the standard answer ...Do a backup restore to fix it, and ironically enough 9 time out of 10 that's what broke it to begin with. (thanks to sync) Quicken came up with sync, it broke a lot of things, they can't fix it and now we just have the bread crumbs of work arounds. Quicken created it, broke it, now doesn't know how to fix it. There's been a humongous number of posts regarding issues created by sync, and there's no denying it. I'm not sure if it even matters if he disconnected the account or reset the account >> it's a systemic problem created when we had sync pushed down our throats!

danieltanguay

Same issue. Quicken needs to fix this opening balance issue and quit treating us like we are doing something wrong! Maybe a class action for all of us that can't use the product we paid for will wake them up!

MGLOWE

Same problem here. Now my credit card accounts are out of balance. I have almost 15 years worth of data. Sync sucks! Quicken needs to acknowledge the issue.

Taywood

I've been a mostly very happy user since the mid-90's and I ran into the same problem about three months ago. The opening balance continues to be altered without warning. I've not been a cloud user and have sync disabled, but sync seems to want to run in the background. The problem began when I added a new bank account of which I have several with the same bank. Quicken didn't like the new account, thus I deactivated all of that bank's acct's in Quicken, validated my file, updated bank's info again, picked and chose the accounts I wanted, and it didn't work. Resorted to manual download's and auto reconciling to bank's #.....and the opening balance continues to randomly change. Super frustrating.