Discover Card goes out of balance

Question

Quicken for Windows, R59.6   I check my Discover Card account online most days, and every day i use Quicken I compare online balance and detail to Quicken.  Discover Card account in Quicken has been constant trouble for months. CC-501, CC-502 and CC-506 errors, transactions not downloading…. Have had to Deactivate/Activate several times in the last few months.  In late July Quicken did not balance to online Discover Center.  I searched for missing, duplicate, incorrect entries but found nothing.  When the August Discover statement came out i made a correcting entry in Quicken to balance the account with the Discover Center.  Late September Quicken was out of balance again and has been since. Again searched for missing, duplicate, or incorrect entries and found nothing.  Entry by entry matched online details.  I restored a Quicken backup from 9/27 and found the BALANCE column does not match the current data BALANCEs even going back a couple months, all Balance totals were off the same amount. On Sept 28 Quicken updated to R59.6. On Oct 1 attempts to update Discover in Quicken resulted in CC-506 errors.  Finally Deactivated/Activated and download appeared successful.  What is causing the Balance to suddenly become WRONG? The Balance is changed as far back as i can check.  My checking account shows register details back to 1994, however, the Discover register only goes back to Oct 2017.  Does Deactivate/activate truncate entries?

BK · Answer

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20456799#Comment_20456799

To be clear neither @volvogirl nor I said anything about any loss of transactions.  I have never experienced transaction loss and I don't know if that has occurred to other users either as a result of a deactivate/reactivate.  So the answer to your original question of "Does Deactivate/activate truncate entries?" is No.

Clearly you have experienced a very frustrating situation.  Two suggestions I have is to (a) do daily backups of your data file, so that you can easily recover from any losses and (b) if you don't use Mobile & Web, turn off Sync in Edit > Preferences > Mobile & Web.

halmenz · Answer

So when Quicken's solution is to deactivate/active an account there should be a strong Warning that taking the recommended steps will result in loss of transactions and wrong starting balance.  I lost 17 years of spending history.

Thanks BK, volvogirl

BK · Answer

@halmenz

Check your opening balance - the very first/oldest transaction in your Discover register and see if you can figure out if that value is correct.  If you have years of transactions, it may not be possible to access and check against old statements unfortunately.

The possible issue: Quicken has had a long time sporadic issue where the opening balance of typically Express Web Connect (EWC/EWC+) accounts get altered after an account is deactivated/reactivated.  Again it is sporadic.  This has been going on for many years and Quicken has made multiple attempts to fix it and has not been successful.  This issue is all over the community reported by many.

Workaround: Go to every one of your account registers' "Opening Balance" and write down the correct value in the memo field of that transaction.  When you register gets out of balance (perhaps after a deactivate/reactivate), this allows you to check the written value against the opening balance to determine if it was altered, and correct it if needed in the future.

Also report this problem via Quicken program's Help menu > Report a problem.