I am having some issues with my Account Register, data management and reconciliation

Carroll Heyward

I have a MacBook Pro , Sonama V14.6.

I am a long time Quicken Premier member V7.9.1.

Recently, 6 weeks ago, while reviewing my budget, I noticed that some categories, that were previously filled in were changed to "uncategorized", the dollars were there but not the assigned categories In trying to find out what happened, most of the changes occurred in my credit card but not exclusively.

I contacted Quicken Help and talked with tech support. His answer to me was that I did have too much data in my transactions file and admittedly they went back to 1994, maybe some 15 to 20 thousand different transactions.

His solution was to just start deleting transactions, so, page by page I deleted all transactions from 1994 to 2006.

When my next bank statement arrived and I did my account reconciliation from the paper bank statement, my account did not reconcile, there was a large difference. Mind you all of my past reconciliations were manually done and most of them were clean with very few adjustments and they would only be in pennies, never dollars.

I opened up the Reconciliation History tab, I found on 12/10/20 there was a difference of the same amount and every reconciliation, according to Quicken had a 0.00 dollar difference but when I looked at the different reconciliations the Reconciled Balance and the Quicken Balance, subtracting one from the other all equaled the amount shown on the 2020 reconciliation, some 43 statements.

I recently reviewed this with another tech and he said, that at the end of each year, I would have to make a journal entry, to adjust my account for the checks that were being deleted, I was uncomfortable with that recommendation, maybe I am OCD?

Mind you the paper statements reconciled but not Quicken.

I have three questions:

How did this come about?

How do I fix it?

How do I avoid it in the future?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Quicken Kristina

Hello @Carroll Heyward,

To answer your questions:

1. Based on your description of what happened, the reconcile is off because of Support's advice to delete transactions, without any sort of balance adjustment entry to make up for the change in balance after the transactions were removed.
2. There are a couple options to fix the issue -
   1. Putting in a one time balance adjustment to make up for the change in balance from deleting transactions should allow everything to properly reconcile.
   2. Since the entire sequence of events started when categories unexpectedly changed to "Uncategorized", you can restore a backup from before that issue happened. Doing this would bring your file back to the way it was before any changes were made.
3. To avoid the issue in the future, I have 2 recommendations -
   1. Make frequent backups. That way if anything unexpected or unwanted happens, you have a recent backup to restore from.
   2. I do not recommend deleting transactions to "shrink your file size". If your file is getting too big or too error prone, then it would make more sense to start a new file and keep the old file so you still have access to your historical data.

I hope this helps!