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?
how do i get to paper statement instead of just a list of xactions?
I want old school i need to find out why i am off by hundreds of dollars evry month…….
@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.
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.
