Is Quicken unreliable? How to best reconcile if Online Balance doesn't match Ending Balance?
Hi all. This might end up being a long post, but I have a practical question in the last paragraph.
I will start with saying that I love Quicken. I have used it for over 20 years, I use it for everything from family finance tool, to record keeping of items we buy (eg model number of electronics, etc) - so it is a very critical tool in my life.
When it works fine, it is great. I go through all downloaded transactions and reconcile everything periodically.
But unfortunately I often encounter issues that leave me wondering if the program is reliable enough; especially for long time use. Some specific examples:
1. At one point I opened some older paychecks and none of the regular paycheck-style breakdown was there; it basically opened a blank window. The total was there, but none of the categories (salary, taxes, etc). I had to reenter all those from scratch.
2. The other day i had to reenter a bunch of transactions that are split transactions with tags. Each amount in the split has a tag, say i entered as Tag1. In the registry, it looked fine. But in a report, it looked like it had TagA:Tag1. I was unable to get rid of TagA; even if i removed all tags, the report still showed TagA. So i had to redo all of those (these were monthly insurance payments)
3. This happens with some frequency and it really bothers me. I often check that my Ending balance matches the Online balance, and when it does, all is good with the world. But then (maybe every 2-4 months? it varies) it is not the same. And then i know that I have to dedicate a full day to fixing it. I already know this to be an issue, so I download all transactions from my bank websites to Excel for backup (which i really should not need to do if i could count on Quicken). So when this happens, I go back to Excel, and try to find the earliest balance that matches, and work backwards from there. Often there is a missing transaction (which I am not sure how it became missing, it was there before, obviously).
Now I am facing this again, where my Amex balance is off. I went back as far as 2013, and my balance is off even there. How did that happen? I usually filter transactions to last 12 months when i edit/reconcile them, how did a transaction pre-2013 got deleted or changed? So then I started looking by year (first, matching just the number of downloaded transactions - but even that is tricky, because Quicken has slightly different dates than what my excel download has, and so end of Dec/beginning of Jan can throw the count off). So i have to manually look for the transactions a few days before/after the end of the year. As I am doing this yesterday, there is a particular transaction in Quicken listed for 1/1 that I don't see in Excel; then i find it in October. How on earth did a date change in Quicken??
All in all, I am losing confidence overall.
But the practical question is: now that my balances are off, what is the best way to reconcile it? As i said, I use quicken to know how much gets paid from where and to where, so adding a dummy line item with the difference to make the balances match doesn't cut it.
