Quicken changed the Opening Balance (QWIN)
I balanced this account on 5/22/23 and it was fine. Now, it shows a balance of about $20,000 too much. Sadly, there was no huge deposit to reflect this erroneous balance. How do I remedy this?
Best Answer
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Hello @GeezerGeek,
Thank you for taking the time to visit the Community to report this issue, though we apologize that you are experiencing this.
We have forwarded this issue to the proper channels to have this further investigated. In the meantime, we request that you please navigate to Help > Report a problem and submit a problem report with log files, a sanitized data file, and screenshots (if possible) attached in order to contribute to the investigation.
While you will not receive a response through this submission, these reports will help our teams further investigate the issue. The more problem reports we receive, the better.
We apologize for any inconvenience! Thank you.-Quicken Jasmine
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Answers
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Hello @mamallama,
Thank you for reaching out to the Quicken Community, though I do apologize that you are experiencing this issue.
Before I can further assist you, I require some more information. Which financial institution are you experiencing this issue with? What is the connection method with said financial institution? You can see the connection method by navigating to Tools > Account List. When did this issue occur? Are you receiving any error codes or messages?
I look forward to your response.
-Quicken Jasmine
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The checking account is with US Bank and the connection method is express web connect +. I first noticed the issue yesterday, but have been out of town for the previous week. It was fine on 5/23/23. I haven't received any error codes or messages.
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Hi, When I've had this issue, it was because the opening balance was modified by Quicken during an online service reset.
I would have a peek there.0 -
That makes sense, but how do I figure out the correct opening balance? It was in 2003! Can I just adjust it by the $22,000 that I'm off?
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Usually opening balances are zero. Does it seem like it could be 22k too high?0
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We switched banks, so there would have been an opening balance.
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OK, so you are going to be difficult
1 - You can check your old bank account and see what its final balance is.
2 - You can load a backup from before the issue. If my theory is correct, it can be an older backup. (There can be Quicken initiated backups that are created when you update the Quicken application.
3 - You can compare the balance from a March or April statement to the same date in Quicken.
4 - My opening bank balance was always set to zero and I would create a transfer of the initial amount from the old account. You can check for a transfer as your first transaction.
My opening balance of zero for my account would randomly get updated. Once I set it back to zero, the monthly balances would be correct.0 -
After the Schwab and Chase migrations - and some of the issues that popped up - I went thru ALL my Quicken Accounts and copied the original Opening Balance amount to the entry MEMO field for safe keeping.
The other day - trying to reconcile our Chase checking account - it was off by exactly the amount of a recent Zelle transaction…. could not figure it out - matched against the Chase online website - everything matched - it was really weird. Then started going back and looking at the daily balances - and it was off even prior to the Zelle transaction - HUH ? Don't know what triggered me - but scrolled up to the Opening Balance - which should be ZERO - and BAM - it was equal to the Zelle transaction amount.
Changed it back to zero - and all is good - very weird -
Running R47.15 - NO Quicken software updates - so don't know how it was changed…
Just sharing -
QWin - R54.16 - Win10
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Just found the root cause of a lot of troubleshooting - the opening balance had been automatically adjusted by Quicken! What a bunch of [Removed-Language]! [Removed-Disruptive]
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just to be safe -
go thru each of your accounts
and scroll to each Opening Balance
and copy that amount into the Memo field for safe keeping…I was just hit with that anomaly-
while trying to reconcile - couldn't figure out what was wrong -
until I checked the Opening BalanceQWin - R54.16 - Win10
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And now all we've got to do is to make the programmers understand that
The Opening Balance of an already existing account register is taboo.
It must never be changed by program (e.g., by Sync to Cloud or when reactivating an account).Only when adding a new account register for the first time by means of a transaction download is it acceptable to calculate and create an Opening Balance transaction.
Piece of cake, no?
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Hello All,
Thank you for taking the time to visit the Community to report this issue, though we apologize that you are experiencing this. Could you please tell me which financial institution(s) you have seen this issue happen with?
Thank you.
Quicken Kristina
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Since roughly January 2023, I have experienced reconciliation problems that seem tied to account reconnection/restoration sequences with Quicken after troublesome outages. Two accounts involved are Navy Federal Credit Union checking and USAA credit card. Both accounts are "Express Web Connect". My Quicken software is up to date (R50-14). The accounts are set to reconcile to online balances. My surprise finding looking is that in both cases, after struggle with unaccounted reconciliation differences, I turned back to account opening date and found unsupported Quicken-initiated changes, that is plus-up errors in the ("reconciled") opening balance. In the case of my NFCU checking account I was able to go back to paper statement balance on starting Quicken 12/22.2001. The temporary solution is to manually correct the opening balances, re-reconcile, and delete any balance adjustments made along the way. A better connection method is necessary, in my opinion. Outages lead to time wasting errors. Very disappointing both with respect to NFCU and Quicken..
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Well, I just found out about the problem with Quicken changing the opening balance on an account after spending hours trying to reconcile an account. This happened on two of my accounts. The opening balance transaction on one account that got adjusted was over 10 years ago so that is why it took me hours to find it. It is just unbelievable that a transaction download process would be allowed to change an accepted transaction on the register of an account. Quicken gives the user a warning if they try to change an opening balance but the download process made the change without any notification to the user. How did that happen? Quicken changed the opening balance sometime back in early April 2023. Fortunately, I had enough Quicken backups to find the original opening balance on the account. To me, it is just incredulous that this type of error could have happened in the programming. Looking at the on-line posts, the problem has been ongoing for at least a year and there isn't any indication that it has been fixed. That is pathetic.
Quicken user since 1991, DOS version2 -
I think the Opening Balance bug is related to a Quicken software update - during the program update, the balance gets trashed..
Several of us have suggested - as a protection - to go thru each of your accounts and scroll to the Opening Balance and copy the amount into the MEMO field for safe keeping.
I recently got hit - and like yourself - it took me awhile to finally realize that the difference was bogus and looked at the Opening Balance to see it matched the bogus difference….
QWin - R54.16 - Win10
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Ps56k2 I like your idea about saving the opening balances. I think I will do a transaction detail report and save it to an Excel file so that I will have a record of all opening balances. Thanks!
I don't know what caused the opening balance change but the reason I thought it was due to the transaction update process is because of this post:
I searched the board for "Quicken changed opening balance" and found several other posts that attributed the error to changing or refreshing the transaction download process. I didn't look through all of the posts but could see that folks were complaining of the problem for more than a year.
Quicken user since 1991, DOS version0 -
Hello @GeezerGeek,
Thank you for taking the time to visit the Community to report this issue, though we apologize that you are experiencing this.
We have forwarded this issue to the proper channels to have this further investigated. In the meantime, we request that you please navigate to Help > Report a problem and submit a problem report with log files, a sanitized data file, and screenshots (if possible) attached in order to contribute to the investigation.
While you will not receive a response through this submission, these reports will help our teams further investigate the issue. The more problem reports we receive, the better.
We apologize for any inconvenience! Thank you.-Quicken Jasmine
Make sure to sign up for the email digest to see a round-up of your top posts.
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My issue was with our US Bank checking account but it sounds like it's been happening to a lot of folks with a lot of different banks. It appears to be all on Quicken, not the bamks.
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Periodically when I do an online update to get my new transactions, Quicken is changing the opening balance or adding transactions from different accounts without first asking me to accept them. This is making my balances way off and I have to go through and find the error transactions and delete them. I have run the repair utilities to no avail. This has happened infrequently in the past but seems to be getting worse. Is this happening to anyone else or do I need to consider opening a fresh Quicken file and adding everything?
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I have had the same problem. Anyone know why it's happening or a resolution?
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I have had similar problems. I see a lot of threads on this same topic. Hey Quicken when my balance is suddenly 25000 dollars higher etc what is the quick fix?
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I had it happen recently! I reconcile to my Online Balance every time I download transactions. I almost always balace immediaely or a couple of days later when a new transaction clears. I have been consistently out of balance for a week and I manually checked all my transactions for the past few months.
I was reading in the Quicken online logs about how to go back to reconciling with paper statements and someone had posted that "we know" that Quicken changes the Opening Balances sometimes. WHAT!?!?!
I looked at my opening balance (from 2007 mind you) and it was marked as Reconciled and was the exact amount that my Online Reconciliation was off by. I restored a backup from about 3 weeks ago and see there was NO Opening Balance. I switched back to my current books, deleted the rogue opening balance transaction, and voila, the reconciliation balanced.
QUICKEN - PLEASE FIX THE BUG THAT CHANGES OR ADDS AN OPENING BALANCE. You added an 14 year old transaction to my books!
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Quicken has messed with my opening account balances as well. Thankfully I am very careful about doing backups every single time I mess with an account, so I have the balances that should be at the top of my registers. I feel like I should send Quicken a bill for all the time I wasted trying to find the error!
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I have had the same problems. Many times. This needs to be fixed.
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I am another person experiencing the random opening balance change.
Institution is: Bank of America (Via Express Web Connect+)
Version: R51.12
Build 27.1.15.12Does anyone know if this Is this being looked into?
Gary
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Has anyone seen any response from Quicken yet? This software is completely useless if it reports incorrect balances.
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just an ongoing random bug
I think the Opening Balance bug is related to a Quicken software update - during the program update, the balance gets trashed..Several of us have suggested - as a protection - to go thru each of your accounts and scroll to the Opening Balance and copy the amount into the MEMO field for safe keeping.I recently got hit - and like yourself - it took me awhile to finally realize that the difference was bogus and looked at the Opening Balance to see it matched the bogus difference….QWin - R54.16 - Win10
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Years ago I went through and in the Notes column I put in the opening balance for each month (or by quarter) for the account. This has saved my chaps on several occasions. When balances get hosed up. Makes it quick to find especially it there is a missing transaction or duplicate transaction. All you have to do is compare your amount in your notes column with the amount in the register for that date. A word of warning though … be SURE that you consistently use the same sort order for your transactions in every account otherwise amounts can be off. I use " Sort by Date & order entered". you need to be sure you use the same sort order when you put the beginning balance for the month and when you have to use your register to check for anomalies.
Years ago I offered a suggestion to be able to set "sort by date, order entered" as the standard default setting, but no one understood how and why I wanted it that way, so it was never adapted. Funny as that is the way my FI does it in my monthly statements so why Quicken does it differently as the default is beyond me—I must me missing something!
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