How Can I Reset The Starting Point For Reconciling An Account?

saberman

I have an account that I last reconciled in July. I need to do a reconciliation using the start of the year. How do I do that? If I do ctl-R Quicken says the last reconciliation was done on July 15th. It won't let me enter a new starting point. Is there anyway to force the reconciliation to start on January 1?

splasher

Reconciliation has to be done from oldest to newest. You can't ignore a group of months (like July thru December). You could reconcile July thru December and enter an adjustment to make the balance at the end of December correct (the reconcile will tell you how much). Then proceed with a regular reconciliation for each of the remaining months starting with January.

QuickUserPSP

@saberman it sounds like you are doing a reconciliation for an investment account? It really doesn't matter what the start date of the reconciliation is because when you do a current reconciliation it will "catch-up" to the current ending date, whether it be a statement ending date, or current date, if you reconcile daily.

But you really should reconcile the "gap" period 7/15/23 thru 12/31/23 first before you attempt to do a reconciliation starting from 1/1/24.

If this is not possible, the easiest thing to do is to do a "faux" reconciliation from 7/15/23 thru 12/31/23 just to get the last reconciliation date to reset to 12/31/23. This will also mark all of the transactions within the period to "R". To do this, open the reconciliation (Ctrl+R) and then change the Current Statement Date to 12/31/23, and in the "Ending Cash Balance" enter the current 12/31/23 cash balance from your register. Do not change the prior cash balance.

This should get you to a start point of 1/1/24. But, keep in mind that you might have issues reconciling this current period because some of the transactions that you need for this period may have been in the prior period (before 12/31/23).

Chris_QPW

It is impossible in Quicken to "reconcile gaps", mostly because of what I consider a bug in Quicken, but has never been changed.

If you are in and investment account, it won't even allow you to put in the start date. First off it will not even allow you to put in a start date as you noticed. Quicken really have a start date for the reconcile even though it will tell you the last time you reconcile. It always starts at beginning of the account. That is why when the Opening Balance bug kicks in and changes the Opening Balance amount it throws off the current reconcile.

Let me show you what I mean. I reconcile every day, not I'm going to create a gap a week or two back by changing the status of some transactions to uncleared, and then run reconcile.

So, those "gap" transactions will show up even though I reconciled before at a later date.

So why can't I just reconcile these? After all I can specify an ending date and balance. Let's try that.

I look at the transactions for the ending date of the gap, and the balance:

2/16/22024 and -613.81.

I selected Mark All:

So why doesn't this reconcile?

Well, that is where that bug I mention comes in.

Quicken will ignore cleared and uncleared transactions after the statement ending date entered into reconcile, but it ALWAYS includes ALL reconciled transactions even if they are past the statement ending date entered into the reconcile.

The difference above is in fact the total of all of the reconciled transactions from after the date.

It is this problem of why you can never reconcile past gaps of transactions.

QuickUserPSP

@Chris_QPW I think the type of account makes a difference. My instructions to @saberman was for an investment account. The description of the reconciliation issue sounds like an investment account because of the hard coded July 15th date. None of your examples show a hard coded last reconciliation date. Here is an investment account reconciliation window that shows a hard coded last reconciliation (statement date) -

The last reconciliation date shows 9/9/23 and the only way I can change that date is to do a "reconciliation" and enter a new date in the "Ending statement date" box.

Chris_QPW

The dialogs are different, but the things that don't change are:

1. Quicken reconciles from the start of the account, it ignores "prior/last reconcile" dates.
2. You can't specify a starting date.
3. You can't reconcile "gaps" because reconciled transactions will be included in the totals even if they are past the ending date that you enter for the reconcile.

Note in the distant past Quicken would include cleared and uncleared transactions in the reconcile even if they were past the ending date entered. Even recently some people that have had bad ending dates/transaction downloads where they have transactions that are included in a statement even past the ending date have complained about this. They wanted it like it was in the past where they could reconcile "future" transactions. Of course, every time they complain the SuperUsers point out (and rightly so) that it makes no sense to include transactions with dates past the ending date even if that date is downloaded wrong.

But for some reason Quicken Inc has never hear the call to the fact that reconciled transactions after the ending date shouldn't be included either. It just isn't that uncommon that someone might want to back fill/reconcile transactions, and as it sits right now the only way to properly do that is to un-reconcile transactions all the way back to where the "gap" is so that there isn't an reconciled transactions after the ending date given.

QuickUserPSP

@Chris_QPW - Quicken's reconciliation process is rudimentary at best. I can reconcile any which way I want on Quicken and as many times as I want, for any period I want. Nothing is set in stone. It is not a true reconciliation system. @Saberman wanted a new reconciliation start date of 1/1/24. There is nothing wrong with what he asked for. I showed him how to do it, and there is nothing wrong with that either.

QuickUserPSP

@Chris_QPW please no further discussion directed towards me on this topic. You are "beating a dead horse".

Chris_QPW

I agree with you that Quicken Windows reconcile system is not the best and the request is certainly valid. I was just pointing out of how it works (and doesn't work). At a minimum is shouldn't include reconciled transactions past the end date entered.

Are there "workarounds" of course. One doesn't have to use the reconcile feature/window at all. You can set the transactions to reconcile however you like, using whatever system works for you. But I was just trying to talk about how the existing system works so that if they are trying to make it work, they understand what it is doing and not waste their time being "surprised" when it doesn't "reconcile"/balance.

And for the record, Quicken Mac has a completely different system, which from what I understand it much better than the one Quicken Windows has. I even put in an idea that Quicken Windows should get it, but almost no one voted for it, not that I think they would do it anyways. It has a reconcile history.

saberman

I believe I confused some folks. I wanted to go back and reconcile the year starting at 1/1/23 and ending on 12/31/23.

Chris_QPW

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20423334#Comment_20423334

I don't believe there is any confusion on what you wanted, there was just a disagreement of what would work. I agree with @splasher you can't reconcile "gaps" using Quicken Windows reconcile feature. You can't specify a start date, Quicken is going to start from the beginning of the register. The "last reconcile" is just for the user, Quicken never uses in the actual reconciling. It will not "ignore" transactions before some date, you can't even put in such a date. You can put in an end date though so you would (should) be able to use that end date to restrict the reconcile to being from the start of the register to that end date, but because of the bug that Quicken includes reconciled transactions that are in the register after the end date entered, this will not work either.

@QuickUserPSP seems to think that it would be different in an investment account, but I don't find that to be true.

I will do the same thing I did for a credit card account above and create a gap in the reconciled transactions:

Start:

Create gap:

Start reconcile:

Per @QuickUserPSP 's instructions, start:

Change date to 1/30/24 (the last transaction in the clear state) and the Ending cash balance of 1.36. Leaving the Prior cash balance alone.

The result:

There are three approaches to fixing this. @splasher gave probably the quick and dirty fastest way. Go ahead and just put in a reconcile end date of 12/31/23 and it isn't going to balance, but you can select Done anyways, it will put in an adjustment transaction and fix that as needed (if it really reconciled you should be able to delete this adjustment and not mess up future reconciling).

Another approach would be just to mark the transactions reconciled by selecting that range of transactions (procedure for a non-investment account, click on first transaction, then hold down shift key and select last transaction and then right click on one of the transactions and select Reconcile status → Reconcile). For investment accounts start out by selecting the gear icon and then Edit Transactions. The procedure of selecting a range of transactions is the same.

To do an "official/correct" reconcile you would have to un-reconcile the transactions after 12/32/23 do that reconcile and then reconcile the rest.

q_lurker

@saberman

You have (apparently) already reconciled 1/1/23 - 7/15/23. I gather you want to redo the reconciliation of that period and exted it through the end of the year - 12/31/23. Correct?

To unreconcile 1/1/23 - 7/15/23 you would need to change the Clr status of those transactions from R to blank or c (your choice). for a non-investment account, you can highlight a group or series of transactions, right-click on one of them, and choose the Reconcile Status option to change the entire selection. For an investment account, the change needs to be done one at a time, as far as I know.

Once you are back to the starting point you need, you should be able to proceed with a normal reconciliation across whatever time frames (month by month?) you need.

Chris_QPW

@q_lurker said:

For an investment account, the change needs to be done one at a time, as far as I know.

It can be done with the relatively new: gear icon → Edit Transactions