Credit Card Reconciliation Report

mike

Would like the ability to create a report that shows the Online Balance and account balance for the last reconciled transaction. Would make it easy to see what accounts need attention. i have a large number of credit cards and this would save me going account by account to ensure the accounts are reconciled.

Mike

Quicken Kristina

Hello @mike,

Thank you for coming to the Community to share your idea! There is already a Reconciliation report (Reports>Banking>Reconciliation). Depending on what reconcile settings you use, it may show the information you want plus extra information (previous balance, ending balance of bank statement-your online balance if you reconcile against the online balance, and either a summary of transactions or list of transactions, depending on what option you pick. Does the existing report meet your needs?

I look forward to your response!

Jim_Harman

How would this report work, and how would you use it?

I understand that unlike the current reconciliation report, this would cover multiple accounts.

Would the Online Balance in the report be as of the last time transactions were downloaded for each account, or would you expect it to update the balance and show the current value? That would alert you if there are new transactions to download.

Or is the idea to show which accounts have not been reconciled? I have all of my credit card and banking accounts set to automatically reconcile to the online balance, so they automatically reconcile at the end of each download session. Would that be helpful for you?

UKR

For a quick review of which accounts have been reconciled on what date please try this:

• Go to Tools / Account List
• Maximize the Account List window
• Click to enable Show hidden accounts as needed
• Click the Options button (lower left of Account List window)
• Ensure that Show last reconcile date is selected (has a checkmark)
• Add or remove other columns as needed

Now the Account List will show the last reconcile date.
Unfortunately, the Account List cannot be sorted by any of the columns.

mike

The reconciliation status report I envision would show the last/current online balance for a credit card account and the balance of the last reconciled transaction in that account. The online balance would come from the online balance amount that shows at the bottom of the individual accounts - the online balance the last time transactions were downloaded. I do have a report that shows all transactions in a "cleared" status (waiting to be reconciled) and use this as a guide to ensure I'm reconciling my accounts as needed (find that the blue ball to the left of the account name isn't a reliable indicator of whether an account has newly downloaded transactions) . Having a online balance vs reconciled balance report would provide assurance that the accounts are currently reconciled without having to open each account to verify that it is current on its reconciliation status. Simply looking at the last reconciled date doesn't provide any assurance that an account's reconciliation status is current in that across 18 credit card accounts I have various levels of activity. One account may have only one or two transactions a monthly while others have a much higher usage rate. A reconciliation date that is three weeks old may be perfectly fine in one account while in others it would indicate a problem. I do run account update two to three times a week.

Mike

Jim_Harman

Have you tried the "Reconcile using online balance" option, as I mentioned above?

That will automatically reconcile the account at the end of each download session. If the balance including the cleared transactions matches the online balance, the cleared transactions are marked as Reconciled. If not, it opens the Reconcile screen for you to make any adjustments or select Finish Later.

No report needed, no need to check each account to see when it was last reconciled.

Chris_QPW

A couple of "note" to what @Jim_Harman suggested. The selection "Reconcile using online balance" the Online Services tab doesn't ensure that you have automatic reconcile on, that can be selected, and you can still be manually reconciling, but just to the online balance.

This is what turns it on, and to even go get to this setting you have to first turn off reconciling to the online balance on the Online Services tab and then do Ctrl+R to start a reconcile.

(This setting will force the "Always use Online Balance…" option on).

WARNING do not use "Auto reconcile downloaded transactions" if you are also using this option:

When this option is off the transactions go into the Downloaded Transactions tab and you accept them into the register ensuring that the payees and categories are correct. When this procedure is done that is when automatic reconcile kicks in.

When your transactions go directly into the register this is different. The automatic reconcile kicks in right after the download finishes. The problem with this is that reconcile clears the New/New Match statuses that are used to review downloaded transactions to ensure the payee names and categories are correct. The process should always be download transactions, review them for correctness and then reconcile. This is easily done by just not having "Auto reconcile downloaded transactions" selected, but do have "Always use Online Balance…" on. Then the process is download, review, Ctrl+R, and if it reconciles, Done, which also serves to mark the transactions reconciled as reviewed so that you don't have to do it individually.

The one stumbling block in all of this is that the Online Balance has to be correct, and it isn't for all financial institutions at all times.

mike

I do have all my accounts set to download transactions, I review the transactions, and then press Ctrl+R to complete the reconciliation process. Again the issue I have is that some accounts get periodic transactions and I do manually look at each account that I haven't reconciled that day to see if they are in a good reconciliation status. This is because the last time an account has been reconciled may be 3 weeks ago and I want to ensure that that account is still in good shape.

As for the Online Balance not being correct, the only time I encounter that is with Synchrony Bank where there are multiple credit cards under that "umbrella". One out of 3 accounts does not show the correct online balance - the other two have always been correct. Don't know why but not a big issue for me.

Mike