Linking Bank Account for First Time - Balance Way Off

Question

I just updated from an outdated version of Quicken (2016) to the Windows subscription.  I had it download my checking account and credit card account transactions for the first time, and once it did, it said I had $17,000 more in my checking account than I actually do.  How do I go about figuring out what went wrong?

UKR · Answer

In the checking account look at how these credit card payments were categorized.

If the transactions' Category field show the name of the checking account, e.g. [XYZ Checking] then that's incorrect. Change the transactions to use the name of the credit card register, in square brackets, e.g. [Big Bank VISA].

After all have been changed, your checking account balance should now be correct.

Now go into the credit card account register.

Most likely you now have two payment transactions in the register for each month:

* One will show the name of the checking account in the Category field (as it should for a correctly linked transfer transaction).
* The other one will show the name of the credit card register. That's incorrect. Delete this transaction.

Once you have deleted all these duplicate transactions, your balance should be correct.

For best future results manually enter transfer transactions into your register BEFORE you download transactions from the bank which contain the transfer confirmations. For recurring transfers use scheduled reminders and enter them a day or two before the due date.

That takes the guesswork out of the download process. Because a correctly entered transfer transaction already exists in your account registers, the download process should just match the downloaded transfer transaction to the existing one in both accounts and not cause more issues.

mkl3142 · Answer

Okay, I have actually just realized that my checking account and credit card account are off by the exact same amount, so I guess it is not recognizing the transfers between the two accounts somehow.  How do I fix that?