Paper-Online-Paper reconcile
Comments
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I have switched between paper and online reconcile many times without any problems. Are you using Quicken's Mobile & Web? That is more likely to be the culprit.
Quicken user since version 2 for DOS, now using QWin Premier (US) on Win10 Pro.
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> @Rocket J Squirrel said:
> I have switched between paper and online reconcile many times without any problems. Are you using Quicken's Mobile & Web? That is more likely to be the culprit.
No, I don't use them
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When I reconciled to the paper statement it was off by tens of thousands of dollars. How should I best undo this?I have occasionally toggled in that fashion without an issue.
Exactly how was it off? Are the account balances off as presented in the transaction list register?
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oops. Wonder if it will help if I "Un-Reconcile" the online items0
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> @q_lurker said:
> I have occasionally toggled in that fashion without an issue.
>
> Exactly how was it off? Are the account balances off as presented in the transaction list register?
It seems to be off by about $20,000 via online or paper. The account balances at the bottom of the register all look to be about right. I just validated the data and quicken didn't come up with anything amiss.0 -
What I was trying to ask was, what part was off? Is it the Prior Balance line at the beginning of the paper statement reconcile process, or something else?q_lurker said:When I reconciled to the paper statement it was off by tens of thousands of dollars. How should I best undo this?I have occasionally toggled in that fashion without an issue.
Exactly how was it off? Are the account balances off as presented in the transaction list register?0 -
yes, the prior balance is off since it uses the one that came from the online tryout I did earlier. At the end of the process, even if I manually enter the paper statements starting balance, I get an error of around 20,000 at the end of reconciling0
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No. The prior balance is the sum of “R” transactions in the account including those after the prior reconcile date and after the statement date. You can sort the register by the Clr status to see if there is something mis-set in that regard.0
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Let me state why there is a warning when switching between the two. If you are reconciling to the statement, and you are just about to reconcile that implies that you have about a month's worth of transactions that are cleared, but not reconciled, and they will all show up in the reconcile window. If one the other hand you have been reconciling to the online balance then the transactions up the point of the last reconcile will all be marked reconciled, and if you bring up the reconcile window they won't be shown, only the cleared ones. This might throw people off that are expecting all the month's worth of transactions to show up in the reconciliation window.
It is in fact, a very minor point that probably doesn't throw most people off.
It shouldn't in any way cause the kind of problems you are describing. What you are describing is either caused by a bug in Quicken or a mistake on your part. Sync to Mobile/Web has been mention as a possible cause, but note that enabling/disabling/resetting the online connection has also at times changed the opening balance transaction, so it should be checked first.
The bottom line is that some transaction in the past has been affected. Either is Clr status or amount/added transaction/deleted transaction/changed transaction...
I would check the opening balance transaction first, and then work backwards for checking the balances against statement balances. Note that backup before this happened might help either to start back with that or use for a comparison.Signature:
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> @Chris_QPW said:
> Let me state why there is a warning when switching between the two. ...
Thank you,
looks like I have some detective work ahead. I was thinking maybe I'd copy my data and then go back about two or three months and unreconcile everything followed by reconciling against the bank statement and seeing what happens. Other option is just one correcting entry and hope for the best going forward.0 -
Putting in an adjustment for an activity account would bug me too much.
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> @Chris_QPW said:
> Putting in an adjustment for an activity account would bug me too much.
me too!0 -
how do i get to paper statement instead of just a list of xactions?
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I want old school i need to find out why i am off by hundreds of dollars evry month…….
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@gwa "old school" is reconciling to a list of transactions. There isn't any other way. The online thing that changes is between reconciling to a downloaded online balance or by reconciling to a statement balance that you hand enter.
Reconciling is the process of making your Quicken register agree with the financial institution records (given that the financial institution hasn't made any mistakes, and if they have you have to point that out to them and get them to correct them).
There isn't any magic to this, but it isn't as easy as going to the reconcile dialog and selecting done, it can be that easy if there isn't any problems, but that isn't the whole of it.
Let me start with switching to reconciling to a statement instead of the downloaded online balance, because of the unreliability of that, you should only use it if you are sure that it is in fact correct.
Right click on the account in the Account Bar and select Edit/Delete Account, and then select the Online Services tab.
At the bottom of that dialog uncheck Reconcile using online balance, and select OK.
From now on when you go to reconcile (Ctrl+R while in the register) this dialog will come up.
Select Use paper statement. You can now fill in the Ending statement date and the Ending balance. The Prior balance is calculated based on the transactions in your register, even though it allows you to change it, in will not really affect the reconcile. It is the total of all the reconciled transactions in the register.
Past that one needs to know that transactions that "uncleared" should be transactions that have yet to be posted/downnloaded from the financial institution. Cleared have posted/downloaded, and of course reconciled are the ones that have been marked reconciled in the past. Given that even though there is an option to warn you when if are changing a reconciled transaction, nothing prevents changing them any, changed amount, deleted, duplicated, … And there isn't anything stopping Quicken from doing this too, especially if you use Sync to Mobile/Web, but also while Resetting/deactivating/reactivating, and even during downloading of transactions. In the case of downloading transactions you might match to the wrong transaction, even a reconciled one in some cases.
Since it is possible that any transaction can be changed or deleted or added even in the past, then when things go south you need to know how to check if a given balance/date is correct. If it isn't, then you need to go farther back, if it correct then the problem is later in time in the register. One can use the last statement from the financial institution for this.
But there is a catch. If you haven't been reconciling, but instead just accepting adjustments and such you may not have actually properly reconciled on that date and as such you might have to back farther and farther into the past to fix things. Or maybe take the adjustment and go on. Note that if you have reconcile properly in the past and have a backup from that time you can use that backup and a print of the transactions in the register to help find the problem.
No matter what you do though, you shouldn't be putting in adjustments in the future. In the future you should be finding the problem and fixing it in some way.
BTW if I had statements and such for the whole history of the account, wanted to find the problem(s) I would use what is called a binary search (spliting things in half). But before I did this search I would first check the Opening Balance transaction (should be the first one in the register), because we know there is a bug in Quicken that sometimes changes it. And I would also check the last month's statement. But if the problem is before the last month's statement I would search for the problem by selecting a statement half way between the start and the end and check there. If that statement reconcile is correct then the problem is forward in time from there. If not then it is before that time. In either case you keep splitting the timeframes for which statement to check in half until you are down to it being in one statement and work on that transaction by transaction. Binary searches are very effective in doing this search in the least amount of checks.
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I should probably also mention that to unreconcile a section of transactions you click on the first transaction and then hold down the shift and righ click the last transction (this selects this range of transactions and brings up the context menu). Then select Reconcile and the either Cleared or uncleared.
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