General Issues with transactions being updated after reconciliation

David Brooks

I have a general complaint and cannot put my finger on things. I believe it my heart of hearts that occasionally Quicken updates older transactions, which throws account balances off. The scenario: I've gone through and reconciled an account and know for a fact that everything is correct, it matches online transactions and online balances/statements and I am very much 100%% happy with the status of an account. Now after coming back to Quicken after a day or couple weeks I go thru the account update and cloud sync process (yes I am using cloud sync so that my wife can contribute to this effort) and then I am faced with an out of balance account. I then have to go back through several months of statements to find some random charge(s) that were not there or have to be update/entered to balance the account for a time period that I know for 100% fact was correct the last time i reconciled the account.

this is time consuming and in some ways I have OCD on ensuring my finances are up to date in Quicken. argh

Does anybody else find this happening to them?

is there a way to LOCK specific time periods in Quicken from being changed? I know it's not me manually changing transactions because I would get the warning "you are changing a reconciled transaction are you sure?" message.

Is there a transaction log showing what transaction were updated, when and how/by whom?

mshiggins

Unfortunately the most likely cause of prior transactions being changed is syncing to the Quicken cloud. Next would be having to reset an account’s transaction downloading.

You can add a transaction password that will prevent changing transactions earlier than the specified date. Not sure if that would help as you likely have accounts with differing statement end dates.

splasher

I know it's not me manually changing transactions because I would get the warning "you are changing a reconciled transaction are you sure?" message.

Are you sure it is not something the wife might be causing via the QMobile/Q-Web app(s)? I'm not talking about malicious actions, but something done accidentally.

The thing to keep in mind is that QMobile/Q-Web in conjunction with the Quicken Cloud Account also do imports from the financial institutions independently from the desktop program, so that part of the process can cause hiccups.

When you do your update, are you using One Step Update? Do you have the transactions automatically entered into the register when they are downloaded or do you accept them individually, one at a time? "Accept All" is just as bad as auto-enter since you are relying on Quicken to do everything correctly and that just isn't going to happen.

100% error free auto-pilot is not a feature of Quicken regardless how much Q Inc would like to tell you it is.

Quicken has recently had a penchant to change the Opening Balance in account registers, so we regulars have suggested that users enter the correct Opening Balance in the Memo field of the transaction for quick future reference to see if that is the cause of the imbalance. This "generally" only when re-activating an account for One Step Update.

Best of luck chasing the source of this issue down.

David Brooks

Thank you for the feedback. Just as example today, my checking account is off by a lot of $$$….i went back and spot checked month end balances in 2023, 2022 and going back to 2021 and see that the month end balances are not correct even going back almost two years…so here we go again. trying to find a needle in the hay stack.

So two things i guess I will be doing:

• settings —> Downloaded transactions —> after downloading transactions —> uncheck automatically add to banking rules
• settings —> transfer detection —> check scan downloaded transactions for possible transfer —> confirm possible before entering

I don't see this options, where do I find it?

You can add a transaction password that will prevent changing transactions earlier than the specified date.

This honestly would be perfect because if once i finish my taxes for the prior year, for example, there should be no changes whatsoever to the prior year transactions.