Reconciliation Errors

Jack*

I keep having balance errors when I reconciled, so I started over. I started January with a 0.00 balance.

22,321.72 in Deposits

11,324.42 in Withdrawals

26,892.57 Ending Balance

What I can't seem to understand is why I have a opening balance difference of 11,470.08, cleared balance of -472.78 and a difference of -27,365.35. I have gone over this several times and it just does not make any sense to me. Been using quicken for over 40 years, I have seen this before and just lived with it, this time I am trying to figure out why

Chris_QPW

At first, I was puzzled how you even got an "Opening Balance Difference", but after playing with the Reconcile Details "Prior balance" I see that will come up when you put in something that disagrees with what in in your Quicken register. Doing that is guaranteed to mean you will never reconcile.

A quick explanation of how Quicken comes up with the Cleared Balance and what is used in a reconcile.

The Cleared balance is calculated from the cleared transactions up to the Ending date, and ALL reconciled transactions in the register (even if they are past the Ending date).

I'm not sure why Quicken even allows a user to enter the Prior balance, you can't just tell Quicken to use a given prior balance. When you start a reconcile you it will put in the Prior Balance. You should never change this. The belief that you can look at your bank statement and enter what it says for the prior balance is wrong. To start with you might have transactions in it that have yet to clear the bank. But more to the point, there might be problem transactions in the register that are throwing off Quicken's balance that need to be addressed (In truth most "reconciling" is determining why Quicken's transactions/balance are wrong, not find something wrong with the bank's transactions/balances).

So, for a start you need to see why the Prior balance that Quicken set when the Reconcile dialog came up is wrong. Note that the "prior balance" is calculated by adding up all the reconciled transactions in the register.

Let me give a few examples.

In this case 0.89 is the "Prior balance" because only the last transaction isn't marked reconciled.

Bringing up the Reconcile (note the Prior balance) and entering zero for the Ending balance:

And the actual reconcile dialog (notice no, Opening Balance difference):

Now I will do it again but change the Prior balance (and include that difference in the ending balance).

Of course, depending on how far off your difference is and how much your transaction in Quicken disagree with ending balance you have entered is, you can get different combination of this problem.