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.