Credit Card reconcile: Two separate books?

plate lunch

Just attempted to reconcile my credit card records against the statement from my bank. Ran into the problem reported by multiple people: I checked all the transactions that tracked between Quicken and my statement but I ended up with a Difference of -112.53 that I could not figure out. It should have been zero. The sums for Charges and Payments matched my statement exactly.

The previous month's reconcile for this card went fine so the problem occurred in the last month. I started to scan through previous months transactions and payments to see if I could see anything off. My previous months payment was for 996.68 but never did I see 996.68 in the Balance column(!?) of the register. I pay my balance every month so there should have been a match someplace. I know transactions can clear at different times with the bank and cause some numbers to be off but that was not the case here.

I am familiar with the Opening Balance missing problem (was hit by it before) and checked for that. I was missing the transaction so I created it with a zero opening balance. Nothing changed.

Spot checked my register, trying to match payment amounts with the the values in the Balance column. I had to go all the way back to Nov 2016 before my payments matched a number in the Balance column. After that, the payment amount never matched a number in the Balance column. I saw differences from 38.43 to 83.89 to the current 122.32.

I checked backups going back to Aug 2023 to see if I could figure out when the problem might have started. Oddly, the Opening Balance was missing way back then too and the differences in the Balance column were there too but I didn't compare the exact values and dates.

For the transactions for the last month, they all looked correct except the balance value was off. So I tried running running a Banking → Cash Flow report for my credit card account. My jaw dropped. The report had my previous months balance of 996.68 exactly!!!!!! How was this possible???? Inflows and Outflows matched exactly.

Sooo…

How did the cash flow report know the previous month's balance and the register/reconcile did not? (Two separate books? I thought only crooks did that?)

How did the previous months reconcile work with the offset balances but not this month?

Background Info:
Windows 10
The software automatically updated just before I started. Currently: Ver R57.16, Build 27.1.57.16
(Did the updated version cause this?)

NotACPA

Current month didn't reconcile because SOMETHING was changed … possibly including the OPENING BALANCE in the account.

SO, pull out your old stmts and work backwards until you find an amount that DOES agree with a statement. UN-reconcile (set to "Cleared") everything after that match and re-reconcile month-by-month. (If you try to reconcile all at once you'll probably never find the issue.).

To test the Opening Balance issue, restore a file that was created prior to the prior reconcile (save it to a different name, so as to not overwrite the current file) and open the account we're discussing to view THAT OB. If not the same as current, update OB in original file and try reconciling.

You might also consider recording on paper the OB in EVERY account from the restored file and saving such in the MEMO field of the original file. That was, if the OB gets changed again it will be easy to spot and remedy.

To answer your question: the "prior month's balance" isn't a stored figure. It's the sum of all TXN in the account that have an "R" in the CLR field. So, if one of those txn gets changed or deleted, that "prior month" changes.

plate lunch

» Current month didn't reconcile because SOMETHING was changed

Yes, yes. Something changed…but what? It looks like you believe it is just an Opening Balance problem, but it smelled to me like something more.

- Yes, the account is missing an OB transaction

But…

- The Banking → Cash Flow report for my credit card account had the correct previous credit card balance
- Backups going back a year were missing the OB transaction yet I only had the reconcile problem a few days ago

See the last line of my original post? I had to eliminate that. Luckily, I have a snapshot of Quicken on my laptop that I only update when I go on a trip. My last trip was late last year.

I grabbed a backup that I think Quicken created before the upgrade, filename: Qdata-R-56.9-2024-06-25.QDF-backup. I restored the file onto my desktop Quicken ver R57.16 and my laptop Quicken ver R31.20. I go to the credit card account and lo and behold, the balances on the old version are correct!!! So it is the software update that caused the problem! The OB transaction is still missing but somehow, Quicken covered this up until the latest update. And the cash flow report needs to be checked to understand why it reported different numbers than the account register.

I agree I still have an Opening Balance problem that I need to dig out and fix. The OB transaction is missing from backups going back at least a year. It's the weekend now so I have time to go back to my offline backups to see when the problem occurred.

Rocket J Squirrel

Spot checked my register

I read this and thought "what a good dog!" 🐶

NotACPA

The Prior Balance, in Q, is the sum of all of the txn in the account with an "R" in the CLR field, it's NOT a stored amount.

Without that Opening Balance, it not surprising that you can't reconcile the acct.

plate lunch

Ok, ok. I put in an Opening Balance transaction and marked it as reconciled. I experimented with it earlier but didn't know the actual value until I found a backup file with the original OB. It was zero. After adding the OB transaction, the checking account Balance was still off and could not be reconciled.

I decided to repeat my experiment comparing how an older version of Quicken handled the same backup file. This time, I used a more recent version from April, ver R55.26. I loaded the same backup file I used last time, Qdata-R-56.9-2024-06-25.QDF-backup, into both versions of Quicken. As my in my previous experiment, the older version showed balances that looked correct. The credit card balances for the newer R57.16 was off as previously. I added the OB transactions to the registers of both versions. No changes to the balances.

Having two versions of Quicken side by side, one with a correct register and one with a bad one, I started to compare the registers. When the account was opened in 2009, both registers matched perfectly. At some point, the registers went out of sync resulting in a difference of $122.32 last week. After some searching, I found the transaction where the registers went out of sync. And what a surprise! The two versions of Quicken were treating the same transaction differently! Here are snapshots of the registers for Feb 14, 2017:

This is from ver R55.26. Everything looks as expected.

This is from the latest ver R57.16. What the ……

This is the exact same backup file loaded into two different versions of Quicken. A little math tells you that 61.16 is one half of the reconcile error of 122.32.

I can't even begin to speculate on how this could happen. How is this possible? Why this particular transaction? Is this a new problem or something in my data that just aligned for me with this update?

Hope Quicken is watching. This looks like a pretty serious problem to me.

RalphC

No, Quicken is not watching. This is a user forum. You need to contact Quicken Support and explain your difficulties. I am not experiencing any issues like that, and never have.