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Quicken 7.6.1: Multiple Reconciliation Bugs

M Campbell Crockett

Currently, I have Quicken Classic Business & Personal 7.6.1 and 7.6.2 installed on a 2017 iMac with a 3.5 GHz Quad Core Intel Core i5 running macOS Ventura 13.6.6.

The first indication of a bug was provided in the following screenshot. SAFE Credit Union reported the balance in my checking account as $6,195.66 on 31 March 2024 while Quicken reported a balance of $6,184.39.

The first thing that one notices is that my dividend of $0.28 for March is not included in the list of transactions for March. The reason that the dividend didn't appear is that it was recorded as being Posted on 01 April 2024. As 31 March was a Sunday. I didn't update Quicken until the following day. In addition, I failed to change the transaction date for the dividend interest from 01 April to 31 March when the transaction was downloaded to Quicken.

The first problem encountered is that there is no way to correct the Posted date in Quicken. One can only get the Dividend to display in the Reconciliation window is to delete the downloaded transaction and manually re-enter it in the register.

Manually re-entering the dividend transaction led to discovering the second bug in the reconciliation process. Quicken was not including any transactions in the reconciliation process that occurred on 31 March 2024.

Note that I had to change the OMO U & ME CIGARETTES entry to Uncleared from Cleared for the Statement and Quicken balances to match.

I still need to reconcile my other accounts at SAFE Credit Union. There has to be a better way to correct the dividend transaction in each account than deleting the downloaded transaction and re-entering it manually before attempting to reconcile the account.

Does anyone have a quick fix to these problems? Or, is the only solution to wait for @Quicken Bree to light a fire under the developers?

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Comments

Jon

If you had to manually un-clear a month end transaction to match your statement balance, that isn't Quicken's fault - your bank didn't include those transactions in your statement. I sometimes have to do that too.

It's also not Quicken's fault that the posted date on the interest was a day late, and I don't think it was your fault either - the posted date is set by the bank & it doesn't have anything to do with when you update Quicken. In a case like that I think I would change the reconciliation date to be 1 day later so it would pick up the late transaction. (I have to do the same thing with my CMA account but for the opposite reason - a pension payment that is supposed to post on the 1st routinely posts a day early instead.)

jacobs

@M Campbell Crockett I agree with @Jon: there's no bug in Quicken's reconciliation; your problem is with your bank in one place saying a transaction happened on March 31 (your bank statement) and in another place saying the transaction happened on April 1 (the posted date in the downloaded data).

There's a very simple way to deal with such an issue: rather than deleting the interest transaction and re-entering it manually with a different date, simply enter the ending date for your reconciliation as April 1 rather than March 31. This will get the reconciliation window in Quicken to include the interest transaction posted on April 1. And if there are any other transactions posted on April 1 which truly belong in April and not March, just make sure they are unchecked in the reconcile screen. Then your reconcile will work perfectly. 😀

As for the other transactions you had to uncheck in your reconciliation, these seem to be working correctly as well. One was a check you manually entered on March 29 which hadn't cleared the bank by March 31. That's not so unusual, and unchecking such an uncleared transaction is the normal and correct thing to do. That's what reconciling is about: matching what happened at your bank in the real world to eat you have entered in your bookkeeping system. It's typical to have transactions deposits and payments, which may be on the books as of month end which haven't cleared the bank yet. In business accounting, such deposits in transit and outstanding checks are a normal part of every month's reconciliation process — and it's no different for personal finance with Quicken.

There's nothing for the developers to fix here, as what you've shown is that reconciliation is working as it should. The only "trick" you need to employ in Quicken is using an ending date for the reconciliation which is a day later than the financial institution if they include transactions on the last day of the statement which don't post until the following day. But that's not a bug in Quicken, it's a flaw with the way your financial institution handles such transactions.

P.S. If you have a recurring issue with the interest transaction posting on the first of the month, here's another way to solve this issue: enter a scheduled transaction for the last day of the month for your interest transaction. Use a dummy amount like $.01 or $9.99, since you don't know the actual interest which will be paid. In your Settings > Connected Services, uncheck the box for "Use posted date for matched transactions (instead of the date you enter manually)". Now, when that interest transaction downloads from your bank on April 1, Quicken will keep the date as March 31 — the date of your manual transaction — while changing the amount to be the amount downloaded from the bank. And this transaction will then appear just as you expect in your reconciliation window using a March 31 ending date.

M Campbell Crockett

@Jon, @jacobs: I will respectfully disagree with your assessments based on how the Open Financial eXchange Specification defines usage of the <DTPOSTED> and <DTAVAIL> fields. The following four transactions were taken from the OFXLog.txt showing the deposit of dividend interest in each of my SAFE Credit Union accounts.

<STMTTRN><TRNTYPE>CREDIT<DTPOSTED>20240401070000.000<DTAVAIL>20240331070000.000<TRNAMT>.28<FITID>337<NAME>Dividend<MEMO>Dividend</STMTTRN>

<STMTTRN><TRNTYPE>CREDIT<DTPOSTED>20240401070000.000<DTAVAIL>20240331070000.000<TRNAMT>399.13<FITID>246<NAME>Dividend<MEMO>Dividend</STMTTRN>

<STMTTRN><TRNTYPE>CREDIT<DTPOSTED>20240401070000.000<DTAVAIL>20240331070000.000<TRNAMT>223.52<FITID>2515<NAME>Dividend<MEMO>Dividend</STMTTRN>

<STMTTRN><TRNTYPE>CREDIT<DTPOSTED>20240401070000.000<DTAVAIL>20240331070000.000<TRNAMT>192.93<FITID>2505<NAME>Dividend<MEMO>Dividend</STMTTRN>

Each of the above transactions show the proper usage of the <DTPOSTED> and <DTAVAIL> fields. The dividend transactions were posted to the accounts on 01 April 2024; however, the dividends were marked as available to me on 31 March 2024. As the dividends were reported as being available to me on 31 March 2024, Quicken should have included them in the Reconciliation window.

jacobs

Quicken doesn't have a "Date Available" field. Every transaction has only a single date field for the transaction; for downloaded transactions, there is also — for reference purposes only — a date posted field. The transaction date is set to the posted date on a downloaded transaction unless your Quicken preference is set to use the date you manually entered.

Quicken uses the transaction date to determine what is included in a reconciliation window. You have the choice of having Quicken record the end-of-month date if you have a manual (scheduled) transaction. You alternative have the option of simply setting your ending reconciliation date a day later to include the transaction(s) posted a day later.

There is nothing new here; Quicken Mac has worked this way for many years. There is no bug here.

Jon

@M Campbell Crockett I took a look at that spec, it defines both of those date fields but doesn't appear to say which one takes precedence when they're both included (it doesn't really say much of anything at all about DTAVAIL, it only shows up 2 times in the whole spec & one of those is the index). So it's a gray area. Obviously you feel DTAVAIL is more important than DTPOSTED but Quicken went the other way.

I can't say I've ever run into that exact problem. The one time I found Quicken wasn't including month-end interest in a reconciliation because the transactions were dated on the 1st, when I took another look at the statement the end date had been pushed back a couple days & ran through the 2nd of the following month instead of ending on the last day of the month like it normally did. Once I corrected the end date the reconciliation proceeded normally.

M Campbell Crockett

@Jon I've looked at both the 7.6.1 and 7.6.2 OFXLog.txt files. Each is between 9 and 10 MB in size and contain roughly 5 months worth of log data. During that 5 month period only December and March closed their monthly statements on a Sunday. Normally, the DTAVAIL and DTPOSTED timestamps are identical and are set to the closing date of the monthly statement.

The DTAVAIL field is the most important to me as it defines the date on which I have access to a banking deposit. The only times that the monthly closing dates were on a Sunday were December and March. The only time that the DTAVAIL and DTPOSTED differed was in March. In December it is likely that DTPOSTED and DTAVAIL timestamps match and that dividends be included in the correct year for Quicken's year-end processing.

jacobs

The DTAVAIL field is the most important to me as it defines the date on which I have access to a banking deposit.

Then why not use a scheduled transaction, which allows you to control the date the transaction appears in Quicken?