Projected Balances - Quicken randomly multiplies a Bill Reminder by a factor of 2 or 3

Question

Quicken randomly decides to multiply a scheduled Bill Reminder by 2 or 3 in Projected Balances so I can't tell what my end-of-month projected balance will be without checking the math for each transaction - which defeats the purpose of accounting software.

This issue has been around for a while.  Has anyone else seen this and found a fix?

Here's an example from the Projected Balances ledger.  For the second entry below, Quicken calculates: $10,356.29 - ($857.68 + 3x$180.89) = $8995.94.  The second and third rows are bills with the same date which might explain why Quicken subtracted both bills at the same time (which doesn't make any sense for a ledger either).

UKR · Answer

The Projected Balances view may not show all transactions in the register. It concentrates on scheduled reminders.

Please check your register view for the account in question, to see if there are other transactions for that date already in your register.

It might help us debug the situation if, when including images of the Projected Balances view, your snippet contained all columns (feel free to black out the payee name) and make sure the view is sorted by Date.

ssbitar · Answer

@Quicken Kristina

There were two examples this month, one of which I was able to solve this morning (i.e. the one above)

(1) Check Pay entry (with the maths corrected):

$10,356.29 - ($857.68 + 3 x $180.89) = $8955.94.

Solution: I found a duplicate entry in Bills, Income & Transfers (under Bills & Income tab) and this corrected this Projected Balances entry (although I still don't understand why it was subtracting x3)

(2) There remains a problem with another Bill Reminder in Projected Balances (that is also linked to a Bills & Income entry)

The Projected Balances ledger shows:

-$21,224.01 - 2 x ($3354.58) = -$27,933.17

The second line in the Projected Balances ledger above is the only transaction scheduled for that day and this entry is not duplicated on the Bills & Income tab.

I haven't been documenting this problem in detail but it has been going on for a while now - I'm thinking a few years.  That is good advice, I need to start documenting each month to see if it's the same bad actors or if there are any patterns.  The one other piece of information is that when I enter a scheduled payment for a Scheduled Bill that is displaying x2 or x3 in Projected Balances, the problem goes away.

@UKR Thanks for that explanation.  It's odd but good to know that it's working properly.  I also deleted the only past due reminder that I saw in Bill Reminders but that didn't help.

UKR · Answer

Please note that the Balance column in the Projected Balances view is titled Closing Balance. It is not a "Running Balance" like the Balance column in your register.

That means, it displays the balance of the account named in "Account to use" at the end of the day, after all register transactions already in that account and all reminders have been added/subtracted. If you have more than one reminder scheduled for the same day, they will all show the same Closing Balance amount.

Make sure you don't have past due reminders which have been overlooked. They will skew your balance.