Should I recycle Chase accounts after 7 years?

Question

Should I close my checking account and open a new one with Chase? Chase cannot provide statements older than seven (7) years.

Boatnmaniac · Answer

From my perspective, the 3 most common issues that can occur when deactivating/reactivating an account are:

*  THE AMOUNT OF THE OPENING BALANCE TRANSACTION GETS CHANGED:   A good means for helping to ensure that you can easily see if this has happened is to first enter the Opening Balance transaction dollar amount into the Memo field.  Then if the amount gets changed during deactivating/reactivating it is very easy to know what the correction needs to be.  Until you enter the correct amount into the Memo field you might need to restore an old backup file from before the account balance issue began and make note of the Opening Balance transaction dollar amount which you can then enter into the current data file.
* A SECOND OPENING BALANCE TRANSACTION GETS ENTERED:  To determine if this has happened, you will need to scroll through the register to find it.  You can make this process a easier by clicking on the Payee column header which will sort the register in alphabetical order.  Then scroll through the register to where “Opening Balance” should appear and if there is more than one, the more recently dated one will be the culprit.  If you find one, it needs to be manually deleted.
* DUPLICATE TRANSACTIONS MIGHT HAVE BEEN ENTERED INTO THE REGISTER:  These will typically be found in the 90-days or less time period but it could go back further.  There is no simple way to screen for this.  It's a matter of scrolling through the register to find duplicate transactions.  If you find any duplicates, one of the 2 transactions will need to be manually deleted.

Generally, troubleshooting for these 3 issues and correcting any issues found will resolve the account balance issue.

These things do not usually happen but they do sometimes happen.  I personally would prefer to find the issues and correct for them so I can keep the account continuity in Quicken.

But if you prefer not to spend the time troubleshooting your current account in Quicken you could close your current account in Quicken and then open a new account in Quicken.  You do not need to close your current account and open a new one at Chase.   Just connect the new account in Quicken with your current account at Chase.

Which path you take is a personal choice.

Chris_QPW · Answer

You could store the old statements locally, and therefore you would have statements for the full history of the account.  I would also rely on good backups.  Even though if something goes wrong it will probably be the online account, there isn't 100% guarantee that Quicken won't mess up an offline account.

mjeanfreau · Answer

When I reset or deactivate/reactivate online services.....my balances get thrown off. It's difficult to troubleshoot what corrupted the balance without statements.