Famtom Starting balance needed to reconcile correctly.

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I have been trying to finally reconcile my credit card account that was new in November of 2015. To make a long story short, I have discovered that Quicken has some kind of hidden opening balance that seems to change from time to time. I am not able to balance even the first month statement that closed December 18 2015 without entering a balance adjustment. To make matters worse the amount seems to change so I can go from reconciled to not reconciled without any new transaction added or removed from the register. In other words, the balance adjustment has to keep changing so to have net zero reconcile window. WTF

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I found the bug! Or maybe it's a feature?

First note: I am on a windows machine not a Mac using home business version.

After being frustrated that I was not able to balance the account, I decided to remove the ‘R’ from all the entries items and set them to not cleared, and start from the beginning /oldest transactions. Being that I have 8 years of charge and payment entries. I first removed the ‘R’s from the first two years (2015-2017) because it’s very time consuming to click on each ‘R’s and set to not cleared. After that I started to reconcile the oldest date range first. As I got closer to 2018 I started to set more ‘R’ to not cleared. I started to have a theory that maybe removing the ‘R’s had something to do with the need to have a beginning balance more than zero to balance the account and that it was always changing. I finally had removed all of the ‘R’s from every transaction and tried to reconcile the oldest statement again. Wala, there was now no need to put in a beginning balance!!

So the moral of my discovery is; Quicken is not looking at the statement end date when it calculates the reconciled balance amount. In fact, Quicken looks at all reconciled items in the account not taking into consideration the statement end date! This causes the difference amount to be incorrect and triggers a need for a balance adjustment. As more newer items get an ‘R’ (or the ‘R’ are removed) the first balance adjustment amount I did becomes incorrect.

The solution is; Quicken must only look at the items within the statement end date when calculating the cleared balance amount for the purpose of reacceleration. Normally if you are up to date with reconciling you would never see this error. It only occurs if you have some new items with an ‘R’ when you are reconciling an older date range.