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Chase Balances Off - and it’s not the Pending transactions (edit)

Shelley Belle

I have been using Quicken for more more than 10 years with many bank connections and this is the first time I am having this problem. It is not just that the pending charges are creating inconsistencies in the balances, even taking that into consideration my balances are off. I will go back to the end of reconciled transactions and the balance has changed someone unfindable because of long ago (years ago) transactions. It is not happening with any other downloads I do such as AMEX, Citibank

What is going on? It's become unusable.

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Comments

Shelley Belle

I meant someWHERE unfindable.

Tom Young

One problem that does crop up from time to time is that a download, for reasons unknown, will change an Account's Opening Balance. That's the first place I would look.

Probably the most common explanation for problems reconciling arise from some sort of user error where a transaction with an "R" in the Clr column gets changed, deleted, or a new transaction with an "R" slips into a prior period. But if you're sure that a download is doing this, (in my own file while I've had the occasional Opening Balance problem I don't remember other transactions getting changed), then your best defense is to set Quicken Preferences to automatically back up each and every time you run Quicken with the maximum (99) number of backups, and set prompts for "manual" backups at whatever number gives you those backups every few days. At least that way you should be able to find a pretty recent backup with the correct Account balance and figure out what needs fixing.

Shelley Belle

Thank you. If reconciled transactions are being changed it would have to be the download doing that as I am very careful about managing my data. I will check the opening balance as I do have automatic backups on. This problem is only with Chase and it's only checking and savings accounts, not credit cards. It happened today so I will go now and check the opening balance. It's getting very frustrating as you can imagine.

Shelley Belle

Well it's not the opening balance. Is there anyone to download all the transactions from the backup and the current file and look for transaction differences easily other than my writing the code to do so?

Shelley Belle

And it's not simply one transaction that you could easily find by reconciling and finding the difference. The difference does not match any one transaction.

Ps56k2

it’s usually either the Opening Balance being changed, or the Pending Transactions vs Available Balance.
I would go to the Chase website and walk thru your transactions and compare the Chase website running balance to the Quicken Register running balance and see where they match… and then don’t.

Tom Young

Well, if you want to grind through transaction by transaction, open the last known good file, go to the Account, and create a Register report from the date of opening to the the last date in the Account. Export that to Excel. Open the Account in your live file and create that same report. Export that to Excel, putting it on the same page as the earlier report and starting at the same row. I'd probably create a column to display for each row the sum of the amount from the first report minus the amount of the second report. You'd expect $0 in that sum column and any situation where an amount has changed should be immediately obvious.

It might be easier to sum both reports by some period - month?, quarter? - before exporting. That way you could simply eyeball those sums and quickly zero in on the periods of change.

Shelley Belle

Thanks so much for these helpful ideas. I will pursue and if I find something interest I will report back.

Shelley Belle

I stand corrected. I did the examination as you suggested and it is the opening balance that keeps changing. I found a number of backups with different opening balances. So I just did a reactivate and reset and that did not fix the problem. So is there a solution? Is it only Chase that has this problem? Thanks for any advice.

Tom Young

The reason downloads sometimes change an Account's Opening Balance is unknown to me, and Quicken (the company) has never offered an explanation as to why this happens, as far as I know. Back in the days when every Account in my file used Direct Connect I can only remember one time that this happened. Now that EWC/EWC+ is being widely used in my file - say the last couple of years - this error has occurred several times.

In each of my Accounts I've put the actual opening balance in the memo field of the Opening Balance transaction. Additionally I've created a new $0 transaction with the same date as that Opening Balance transaction with that same opening balance (which happens to also be $0 in all my Spending Accounts) in that transaction's Memo field. (A real belt and suspenders approach.)

If I seem to be having reconciliation problems going back to those Opening Balance transactions is the first place I look.

Shelley Belle

Thank you so much for your quick and helpful reply. I will now try to determine what my correct opening balance is and do just as you suggest. This seems to me and I assume you would agree, like a bug in the direct connect that deserves some programming attention. Again, thank you so much for your helpfulness.

Tom Young

" like a bug in the direct connect"

A correction:

The Direct Connect method that Chase previously used was very largely error free. It's with Chase's (and other Financial Institutions) decision to abandon Direct Connect and move to the Express Web Connect+ method that the errors really started to crop up.

Shelley Belle

Gotcha. Yes, the new method is when all my issues started with Chase. Appreciate your correcting.