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Checking Account Showing Wrong Balance

randomguy114

I've been using Quicken for years and years. I've frequently had issues where the display balance has been off and have found that sometimes an transaction may get duplicated or not reflected in the balance, even after years. So many years ago, to help this, I started a process where I leave a dummy transaction in the register. When I reconcile to my monthly bank statement, I enter a $0.00 transaction with a note in the memo field showing the register balance at that moment. If there's a difference between the statement balance and my register balance (like for an uncleared transaction above the note line), I'll note that too and include both balance numbers. This makes it easy to scroll backward and pinpoint a window of transactions where something has gone awry.

My balance in this account is currently off. Today is Aug 18, and my last reconciliation was on 8/4. The register balance at the time of my dummy transaction is different than when I entered the note. But when I scroll back to my dummy note in July, it still matches.

So at some point after 8/4, there's been some sort of corruption in one of the transactions that is in the register between 8/4 and 7/7. The difference is $105.00. There are only maybe 25 transactions or so in that window. Here's the weird part…… There's not one for $105 and there's no combination of any multiples of them that add up to $105.

At this point, I'm not sure what to do. Any thoughts on this? Anyone else ever seen this?

I've already done the "validate and repair" in the file menu, as well as the "supervalidate" option and it had no effect.

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Comments

Tom Young

I guess the next thing I might try is to go to a backup made shortly after 8/4, open that backup with a different name then the "live" file, and print out the list of transactions between the two dates. Then I'd compare the print out to what I'm seeing in the live file to see if I can spot changes that would account for the differences.

As to your "note" process, I do something similar with each statement, using a $0 transaction as the "last" entry in a give statement period. Since things clear so fast these days I can usually duplicate the reconciliation, in detail, right in the Memo area of the entry, The reconciliation looks like "(Statement $) = (Quicken $) +/- (each outstanding item)."

randomguy114

@Tom Young Yeah, I had considered just making a copy of the file, printing the register, then deleting all the transactions in that window and see if that fixes the issue. But just a few weeks ago, I had an issue where the balance was off similar to this. I didn't get around to looking into it and after a few days, magically, everything was fine. I've been waiting for that to happen here and it's been this way for around a week now.

Tom Young

Are you using downloads to populate the register as opposed to making manual entries to be later confirmed as "Matches" when the transaction clears the bank?

When you reference that "similar" situation - which I'm assuming is somewhere between reconciliation dates - how did you catch the difference? If it's by looking at the online balance that gets downloaded, then it's been known to happen that the online balance is wrong and the "magic" might just be that the online balance got properly stated a few days later. But the problem you're referring to now clearly has to be some change or changes in transactions since you're referencing statement date reconciliations.

randomguy114

For this checking account, I don't use it a lot. So it's almost all manually created transactions that get matched up during a sync.

I rarely look at the online balance that Quicken shows. So when it was off before, I'm sure it was that I was looking upward to match up the previous dummy transaction note vs the register balance. In other words, I'm pretty sure it was the same thing as what's going on here, and then it was just fixed one day without any action from me. This time, it seems to be hanging around……

Tom Young

Do you use mobile, and "sync?" Those activities have been linked to changes in transactions and balances. I'm not aware of any SuperUser that uses mobile and has sync turned on just because of these problems.

That said, unless Quicken has a fatal flow and can't do math, the running balance in the Account has to be the sum of all transactions in the Account, so if July is correct and it's now August that's wrong it seems like it absolute has to be some transaction between the two reconcile dates has been affected, somehow.