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.

Jack*

Thanks for a great explanation and getting me further, but not quite there. Let me try to explain, everything prior to December 31, 2013 has been reconciled and everything after January 31, 2024 has been un-cleared. The only items with a "c" are the ones for January 1-31, 2024. In order to have a 0.00 balance for January 1, 2024, I did a ledger adjustment due to changes in the previous year that were made.

If you look at the disaster below, you will see the ledger adjustment for 2,200.31 on December 27, 2023, again this and all before this have been reconciled. You will then see the prior balance and cleared balance at 0.00 and the ending balances match the bank statement along with the listed debit and credits. The issue is that when I clear the payments and deposits for January, it will then change the cleared balance throwing everything off.

Thanks again for your time and help

RalphC

You have such a large error that I would suspect missing transactions, erroneous transactions, and/or data file corruption. Especially since you're having to go back to January to find errors, I would reconcile the account to the current statement. Accept the balance adjustment to agree with the bank and move on with your life. Hopefully, you'll keep current with reconciling every bank statement.

Accomplishing that, I would perform Quicken data file maintenance to assure a healthy data file.

Jack*

The good thing is that I know all my entries are correct. I just don't understand that if I decided to go back to January, cleared everything and started with a zero balance why it would be off right off the bat. I have checked everything possible and the only option would be to start a new file, but I am not that desperate, I just have too many entries and they all link to different accounts and expenses. I am just too anal about keeping track of my expenses and can tell you how much I spend on just about everything. 😂 Thanks again