Opening Balance Difference When Reconciling

chasbom

All of a sudden, When I reconcile my checking account, Quicken is showing a wrong opening balance and a significant Opening Balance Difference and forcing me to create an adjustment to complete the Reconcile. However, the ending balance in the quicken register (without the forced adjustment) matches the ending balance for my account statement and ALL of the transactions are marked as Reconciled (verified by sorting). From reading the forum, it says that Quicken calculates the Opening Balance at time of reconciliation by adding up all prior reconciled transactions. But that does not appear true in my account. It is pulling a opening balance from someplace else. How can I fix this?

Mark Pedroia

Hi, I have the same problem, it's been occurring for years. I don't have a "fix" for the opening balance modification however I (and many others) compensate by entering the correct opening balance in the memo field of the actual opening balance transaction so that when you attempt to reconcile and encounter this bug, you can scroll to the top the register, use the value in the memo field and insert it in the correct column. Important to indicate if the value is a credit or debit so you know which column to enter it into.

splasher

This is a problem that Quicken has that changes the Opening Balance transaction when the One Step Update connection is Reset or Deactivated/Reactivated or you use the Quicken Cloud Account (it stores the information needed by QMobile/QWeb).

As advised by Mark Pedroia, put the correct amount of the Opening Balance transaction in the memo field for future reference to see if it has been changed.

The other things that can cause this to happen are:

If the beginning balance of the reconcile is changing from what they were, it is because the Reconciled transactions have changed.

The opening balance of the reconcile is the sum total of all of the R transactions in the register and is calculated at the time of reconciliation and not stored for future reference.

What could change that # is one of the following:

1. a blank or C was changed to a R
2. an R was changed to a blank or C
3. the amount of an R was changed
4. a new transaction was marked R to begin with
5. a R transaction was deleted

kgwdc

Just a note of thanks for this thread and another on this same issue, which I too experienced and was frustrating me as to why until I landed here. Zeroed out the register's Opening Balance, problem solved.

mikemcdev

I have a slightly different problem and it's with several banks. My accounts show reconciled but days or weeks later, it can't reconcile any longer and the difference is usually in the thousands. How can it reconcile, which it shouldn't have since the balance at that time is wrong, then "correct" itself. I've been hit with insufficient fund fees due to this.

I never had something this bad with Quicken in the 10+ years I've been using it. What's going on? Is this a documented bug to be fixed?

dagwoodg

I wish I'd checked here before all the hours I spent trying to reconcile 3 years of transactions manually only to discover the error went back to an opening balance. I'll know better next time.

dsm1212

Annoying problem that has been happening for years. To make matters worse I took an update in nov/dec that caused me to have to reset most accounts. Otherwise they would download nothing without errors. Almost missed a few bills because of this until I realized accounts were not updating. Then 1 by 1 I have to reset and fix the opening balances. Plus, every update for the last 5 months ends with an updateicons failure. If intuit can't fix these easily reproducible problems you can bet the harder ones are no better. Which means their security probably has gaping holes. Is why I refuse to sync any data to quicken.com.

DaveWhite71

I just had a massive error in my checking account's opening balance when doing my first reconcile of 2024. I don't do any transaction downloads, everything is manually entered. I did do the year-end file cleanup, and I think that is what caused my problem. In looking back at my checking account register, I found a LOT of transactions that should have been removed by the process, but were not. They were all flagged by Quicken's file repair function, as well., and deletion was recommended. They were mostly old paychecks with no corresponding source account, and some credit card payments to a card that I paid off and deleted. Quicken's year end processing is clearly faulty and you should be very careful when using it! I had to do a lot of math to figure out what my current balance should be, then delete the irrelevant transactions, and then update the opening balance to (hopefully) correct Quicken's errors. Given past experiences where Quicken continues to claim opening balance errors for several months, I am REALLY looking forward to next month when I can again deal with Quicken's inability to properly complete a basic banking function.

deliusfan

This happens to me constantly in my credit card accounts. So I should have an opening balance of zero! It's literally a completely fakely added and reconciled transaction. I think these start popping up after I do a validate and/or super validate maintenance on my file. It's ancient; I'm a user from 1999. Yes, lots of closed accounts, but still a lot of long-running current ones, too.

Just last night I had another; I had to go scroll to the top and delete the "reconciled" transaction. So frustrating.