Quicken data gets corrupted - using QW2014
I know you alll are tired of my constant reports of corrupted data, but here I go again. I have annual files with this time a liability account that was a mortgage. Mortgage payments in the checking account all show the correct amount for the year, each month being -$886.55. I have run Account Balances reports for the periods in question in two annual files, those for 2009 and 2010. Here are the monthly numbers for the account in question:
Citimortgage:
Date: 8/31/2009 9/30/2009 … 12/31/2009
Balance: -67,979.08 -100,373.53 … -98,696.00
You can see that the balance made an unexpected jump between 8/31 and 9/30 and ended the year with an incorrect amount.
Now the interesting thing is that a new annual file was created beginning for 1/1/2010. This file shows the same account starting with what appears to be the correct balance for the account and continues through 2010 with the correct numbers.
Date: 12/31/2009 (1/1/2010)
Balance: -65,183.15
This indicates to me that at the point of creating the NEW file for the new year, the account was correct.
But now things appear to have gone bad in the OLD file. There appears to have been some unexplained change to the balance in execess of $30,000 AFTER the annual file was created, and this change continued to affect balances for the remainder of that year, a change that was NOT carried forward in the file at the start of the new year. This means something has gone wrong AFTER the new file was created.
Here are what appears to be the relevant Checking transaction that I have identified:
Date Account Description Category Amount
9/9/2009 Checking Citimortgage IntExp -33281.00
[Citimortgage] 32,394.45
Net Total -886.55
Here is what appears to be the relevant Liability transaction:
9/9/2009 Citimortgage [Checking] -32,394.45
This allowed the reconciliation of the checking account because the transaction net of -$886.55 was correct while the split transfer to the liability account was wrong. Now, I do not believe that I would have allowed this incorrect mortgage liability balance to go uncorrected for the remainder of that year since I also manually reconcile liability accounts monthly, and especially since the new annual file contains the correct opening balance for 1/1/2010. Further, if this incorrect IntExp amount had been there for tax reporting it would have been discovered at that point.
I have many times in various discussions expressed concern that Quicken corrupts its own data internally. Many times I have had previously reconciled Investment accounts regularly go out-of-balance, which I suspect are due to some price rounding issues and sharing of price history between accounts, but I believe this is the first problem with a liability account. I think there are two main possibilities:
- That the Vallidate and Repair process actually makes incorrect assumptions that are not documented and reported to the user.
- That the Quicken application logic contains errors which it cannot itself identify but which lead to corruption ( invalid recording ) of the data in the database.
It seems logical to me that this in not a user data entry error because there is no way I would have manualy entered such a transaction split, and I NEVER do transaction downloads, so the problem MUST be internal.
I do periodically do exports from ALL of my annual files to .CSV files for import to a relational database system, so the files are read several times a year by that process. And I do fairly regular Validate and Repair processes along with those.