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Can we stop changing opening balances?

Rob Taft

I can't fathom why my opening balance needs to be adjusted, especially when the accounts have been using Quicken for over a decade. Twice today I had issues with downloading transactions. The first was my bank account which sent me to the bank website to download a QFX file, which then relinked the account. After clearing out 3 months of duplicate transactions, I'm off $6000 and nothing showing in the reconciliation. I just happened to check the beginning of the ledger because sometimes things appear under 1969 and saw my opening balance was changed to -$6000. It's a 14 year old account, and certainly has never ever carried a negative balance. I had to load in a backup to get the balance to fix it.

Then I added a new Capital One account, and for some reason it won't download transactions on my Capital One CC. It has the online balance for it (which was off by a penny), but it won't get the transactions. So I get the QFX export, link it to the account and thankfully I get transactions. But of course I go to reconcile and I'm off $400. Since I was fresh off an opening balance issue already today, I checked there first. Sure enough the opening balance is changed there too.

Please stop doing this, there is no need to touch that value….ever. It's not the first time I have encountered this, but twice in one day really gets on my nerves.

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Comments

Chris_QPW

There actually is a reason for changing the Opening Balance, but it is only when you are first setting up an account. The rest is a bug that for some reason they can't track down and fix.

The reason for adjusting the Opening Balance when first setting up the account is because Quicken might not get all the transactions back to the start of the account. As such, the opening balance might not be zero. What Quicken does is looks at the ending balance that comes with the initial downloaded transactions and back calculates the opening balance from it and the transactions it gets.

It is also doing this when you "first setup" for downloading transactions, even if the account already has transactions in it. This is most likely what leads to most of reports of this bug. Any Resetting of the account or deactivate/reactivate has a possibility (but not 100%) that it might do this mucking with the opening balance. In my opinion it should never attempt any kind of change if there are any transactions in the register.

Ps56k2

we have suggested to users - to go to the Opening Balance transaction of each account and copy the amount into the Memo field for safe keeping … then you can compare when the bug changes it

[Deleted User]

What I have done to prevent Opening Balances from changing is to create an "Opening Balance" category and use that instead of a transfer back into the account.

Chris_QPW

I might be less prone to this problem too because I never have any Opening Balance transactions to begin with, since all my active accounts have all the transactions, they would all be zero, and as such when creating a new account, I either delete the opening balance transaction Quicken puts in or change it to a transfer if the account is funded from another account. I have only every had this problem on time.

[Deleted User]

@Chris_QPW I think you are on to something when you say the only time an opening balance transaction should be changed is when setting up a new account. I noticed that if I set up a new account and don't delete the opening balance transaction that is automatically created with a zero balance, when it comes time to reconcile, Quicken will adjust that opening balance transaction to make the ending balance correct.

miklk

I had to replace a Credit Card due to fraud. Deactivated and setup Online and the Opening balance was changed just yesterday so still ongoing.

Annoying BUG but easy to find and correct at least. (I think it was related to transactions that were missed between card numbers BUT really not sure)