HELOC Reconciliation Issue

James Bachman

The bank I use for my HELOC (Axos Bank) reports its balance as the amount currently borrowed, not the amount remaining. This causes problems for Quicken when reconciling that account, because it expects the balance to be the amount remaining in the account. Is there a way to rectify this?

NotACPA

NO, In Q you should should show the amount that you owe in a Liability type acct.

James Bachman

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20388348#Comment_20388348

But Quicken is calculating the balance as the amount remaining in the loan, not the amount I owe, so it reports account reconciliation errors.

UKR

Are you trying to Reconcile using the Online Balance, as downloaded from the bank?

Can you please capture one or more images of the parts of your Quicken window showing the issue, sensitive information blacked out as necessary to protect your privacy but annotated to describe the situation, and attach the image(s) here?
How do I post a screenshot in the community from windows

How do I post a screenshot in the community from a mac

Please save images to files of file type PNG, JPG, or GIF only. They're easier to work with than PDF files.

jacobs

But Quicken is calculating the balance as the amount remaining in the loan, not the amount I owe

Perhaps it's the wording you've used, but this confuses me. Isn't the "amount remaining in the loan" the same as "the amount you owe"? If you borrow $10,000, and you pay back $2,000, your resining balance — the amount you owe — is $8,000. Could you provide sample amounts for what the bank is saying and what Quicken is saying, so we can better understand the problem you're describing.

NotACPA

What's the difference between "the amount remaining" and the amount that you owe? Is the 1st transaction in the account the total
Credit line? It shouldn't be. The 1st transaction should be an INCREASE for the amount of the credit line, which makes the Balance RED.

Your payments, after that, go in the Decrease column, and reduce the amount of the Balance … making it less negative.

James Bachman

Ah yes, I see how the way I've worded it could be very confusing!

This is for a line of credit, where I can draw funds up to a certain amount. Quicken is calculating the balance of the account as the amount I have borrowed so far (an increasing amount as I draw more). The bank on the other hand reports the balance of the account as the amount remaining till I reach the credit limit (so a decreasing amount as I draw more). So:

QUICKEN CALCULATED BALANCE = CREDIT LIMIT - BANK REPORTED BALANCE

If my limit was $50,000 and I had drawn it all, Quicken has the balance of the account as $50,000 whereas my bank has the balance as $0. Which means I keep getting account balance reconciliation errors.

jacobs

Thanks for the additional explanation. Well, I'd say your bank is treating "balance" incorrectly. A balance of an account, whether it's a checking account savings account, credit card account, loan account, etc. is the amount you have in the account (checking and savings) or the amount you owe. Calling the remaining credit available your account balance is just wrong!

You have a couple options:

1. You can contact your financial institution, try to talk to a representative knowledgable about their interfacing with third party software applications like Quicken, and explain that they re downloading the wrong balance to Quicken. they should be downloading your actual account balance, not the remaining credit available.
2. You could ignore the financial institution's erroneous downloaded balance and manually enter the actual account balance in Quicken by clicking on "Use Statement Balance" rather than "Use online balance" in the Reconciliation startup window. This requires you to log onto your bank's website to find your current outstanding balance and manually entering that in Quicken. That's annoying, but takes just a minute each month, assuming you reconcile monthly.