Opening Balance Updates

David Brooks

My frustration and reliance on this tool never seems to amaze me. I just did the Jan 2024 Quicken update which also updated the method for connecting to Citi accounts. Lo and behold there is now a new entry for an opening balance amount going back to August of 2022 for one of my citi accounts, throwing off the total balance completely. now need to reconcile the entire account yet again. I turned on the setting so that all new transactions go in the register and i hav to accept them but still….somehow an entry was changed without me accepting it.

Chris_QPW

Unfortunately, this is a known bug. A couple of times in the release notes they have indicated that they have fixed, but still the report of the problem comes up in this forum on a pretty regular basis.

How much? Enough for the SuperUsers to suggest putting the right balance amount in the Opening Balance transaction's memo, just in case it gets changed.

The reason you couldn't stop this is because it really is outside of the transactions being put into the register. And they have yet to implement any kind of "question/block" of this behavior.

I totally understand why the functionality exists, but it is being triggered at the wrong time, and if they can't figure out how to make sure they trigger at the right time they should at least prompt the user to ask if they want this to happen.

The real purpose of this goes like this. You create an account and set it up for downloading transactions. If the full history of the account is downloaded then the balance will be correct, but if not all of the older transactions can be downloaded, the account will be off by the true opening balance. Along with the transactions Quicken gets the current balance. So, with that and the transaction amounts it can back calculate what the opening balance should be to get the current balance. And that is what it does to put in that opening balance transaction.

This seems to trigger mostly on connection type changes and resetting the account online downloading.

David Brooks

Thanks the reply…I am now doing this note taking/commenting on the opening balance. Some of my accounts for a half dozen comments on when the opening balance has changed…just craziness. Appreciate the feedback.

JoelC

I have noticed this as well. That said, as much of a PITA as this is, it is easily identified and fixed. The other thing I now do whenever doing an update is to back up my file → do the upgrade → restore the file, this seems to work.

Jim_Harman

I experienced this issue recently when reauthorizing an American Express account. I wasted some time looking for missing transactions before realizing that without warning the opening balance from 2011 had changed from $0.00 to $63 or so. This caused the reconciliation to be off by the same amount. Resetting the opening balance to 0.00 fixed the problem.