What happen to my checkbook balance?

chgraeff

On Friday my checkbook register was fine. On Saturday the checkbook balance showed a 50,000 plus deficit. What happened? either there are duplicate debits that have reconciled themselves or deposits are missing. I cannot figure this out and the idea of going back years to fix this mind boggling. does anyone have any suggestions of ideas how I can fix this?

QWinUser

The same thing happened to me this weekend. The balances in some of my accounts were way way off negative. I did a validate and super validate, and it seemed to fix the issue, but now I am having additional strange issues. It almost seems like my file was hacked.

chgraeff

ok interesting…how do you validate you acct?

QWinUser

Go to File—>Validate and Repair File

and check "Validate File" and then click on "Ok"

It will take a while sometimes and produce a report which most of the time doesn't have much information, but you should scan it for error messages.

Mark Pedroia

This happens to me routinely. Q H&B seems to tally up all the outstanding (uncleared) transactions then apply that total to the "opening balance" so, all of a sudden, the register balance is way off and you cannot reconcile (accurately). It's become so prevalent that I now record the true (actual) opening balance in the memo field of the opening balance so I can easily change the opening balance back to what it should be. If this isn't your issue, you can always start walking backwards up the register until you see the transaction that has thrown your register into chaos. Hopefully, it's just one. Oh, last, I back-up CONSTANTLY so when issues like the crop up and I can't identify a remedy, I just print out "all transactions" from the current date/time back to the last backup date/time then "restore" and manually keypunch in everything that was lost since the last backup. Yeah, it's really a messed up situation, confidence is (not) high!

QWinUser

@Mark Pedroia - what happened to me this weekend was pretty bad. Some of my balances were "screwy". My checking account was over 100000.00 in the red. There was no transaction(s) that accounted for the difference. Also a closed manual account that never was online was off 50,000.00. And again there were no transactions that accounted for the difference. The only way I could fix it was by doing a validate. And this morning when I did my OSU, every account I had that uses EWC had a CC-800 error that I couldn't fix. When tried I got CC-503 errors on every one of those EWC accounts. I figured out what the issue is for those CC-503 errors. I have proof that it is a system issue. I tried to tell the Moderators of this group a week ago that there was something really wrong with how their servers are matching up accounts with FIs. They never listen or take Quicken users seriously. I have unlinked all of my EWC accounts and will not use the online connections for them because of what I have discovered.

Mark Pedroia

Wow!! On my end, I had so many issues with modified transactions and duplicates that eventually, I stopped using "the cloud" (mobile/web) which I truly miss entering receipts on the fly but I experienced so many issues. Turning it off drastically reduced the problems I was experiencing. Earlier, I had to give up on Budgets because of inconsistencies. Next, there was the incident when EVERY previous paycheck was modified (to the same splits) that honestly created a nightmare if you like accuracy (such as with retirement contributions from 30+ years of paychecks). It took a VERY long time to rebuild my file because the error was undiscovered for quite sometime before being announced. Consequently, backups kept backing up the erroneous paychecks so I had to go "way back" and then rebuild forward - one pay period at a time (no compensation for my time). Presently, the loss of direct connect and issues with EWC+ are really taxing my willingness to keep facing these issues. I too perform a download from the institutions because the EWC is so incredibly spotty. My initial post was to help with your issue, I didn't mean for it to turn critical about the product but those are truly the memorable events and have severely eroded my confidence and put me on the offensive with excessive back-ups so I can mitigate the next unexpected event. Right now when I validate, it includes a "damaged file" or similar but the problem is not further described so, somewhere in my giant data file, there is a problem and one that I surely did not create manually!!

chgraeff

I spoke with a guy in customer support who insisted it was a problem on my end. it is not. Once I realized that he was not going to help fix the problem it became an issue of how to restore the most recent healthy backed up file. The guy walked me through restoring my most recent health data file. I am now a few weeks behind not years. (I had some how managed to click the box that automatically backs up current data file and stores all of the backs up in my hard drive.) I am a little freaked out because Quicken won't take responsibility for what happend and it feels like this is the only game in town. I am going to begin a review of my options which will include more conversations with Quicken. This is unacceptable for a subscription service.

chgraeff

Also…thanks to you all for chiming in and offering you help, advice and experience! I suddenly didn't feel stupid! :)😁

NotACPA

Many of the SuperUsers suggest that you save the Opening Balance amount for your accounts in the "Opening Balance: transaction of each non-investment transaction. So that if Q screws up that transaction, you at least know what it should be.