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Credit card reconciliation is using wrong month's starting balance

RCButler3

I am manually reconciling some old credit card statements (life got in the way of keeping up with this) I successfully reconciled one month (period July 10- August 9), and the ending balance was correct in Quicken, matching the end of month balance on the statement. That date and balance should be the starting balance for the next statement. Now I have moved on to the following month. When I go in to reconcile, Quicken tells me the July 10th starting balance, instead of the August 10th starting balance.

I have shut down and restarted Quicken a number of times (which usually gets rid of glitches like this). But I continue to get the July 10th starting balance instead of the August 10th starting balance.

Notes in other discussions/articles say to go in and correct the starting balance - that is not an option on a credit card. It also says maybe I changed or deleted a R item, which I don't believe I did, but no instructions on figuring out what to do if I did that.

I am running Windows 11 (recently updated) Quicken release is R57.26

Thanks for any help - I really want to get caught up on this!!!

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Comments

Tom Young

"Notes in other discussions/articles say to go in and correct the starting balance - that is not an option on a credit card. "

Of course you can change the starting balance on a credit card, just like any other Account. That's probably not your problem here if the opening balance is exactly the July 10th balance, but I'd look to see if that opening balance in the Account has been changed.

The opening balance is calculated "on the fly" as the sum of all transactions that have an "R" in the Clr column. So do all the transactions in the period July 10 - August 9 have that "R?"

RCButler3

Hi, thanks for responding!

First, here is a snip of what the reconcile page looks like when I go in to reconcile the credit card statement August 10- September 9th.

reconcile window before entering anything.png

I do not see any way to enter a starting balance for the credit card reconciliation. It only asks for ending date and ending balance and pulls the starting # from the last statement's ending balance.

I have made sure that all items that cleared during this current statement period have an "R" in the cleared column, and in the reconciliation window, the totals of payments & other credits, and purchases and adjustments match the statement exactly. But because Quicken has the July 10th balance as it's starting point, the "difference" calculated in the reconciliation is exactly the difference between the starting balance in August and July.

Still baffled on how to get past this.

volvogirl

The starting balance they’re talking about is the actual starting balance in the Account, not the reconciliation balance. It’s the first line in the whole register. Sometimes it is getting changed. Go check that. If it is wrong and you fix it then also put the real starting balance in the memo field so if it gets changed again you will know what it should be.

Tom Young

"I do not see any way to enter a starting balance for the credit card reconciliation. It only asks for ending date and ending balance and pulls the starting # from the last statement's ending balance."

As @volvogirl said, the references to "Opening Balance" you're seeing here in the community refers to the Register's opening balance, not the opening balance for the reconciliation. There's no spot on the reconciliation form to enter that opening balance, because it's calculated each time you start the reconciliation, even though you can't see it. In fact, I should have questioned your statement " When I go in to reconcile, Quicken tells me the July 10th starting balance, instead of the August 10th starting balance." Where are you seeing that?

"I have made sure that all items that cleared during this current statement period have an "R" in the cleared column"

I assume that "R" is a typo and you really are referring to a "c" there. If every transaction that cleared in the 8/10/24 - 9/9/24 period did have an "R" in the Clr column then you wouldn't see them on the reconciliation page since only "c" transactions show up there, waiting to be reconciled.

So are you saying that even though every transaction in the prior month's reconciliation has the appropriate "R" in the Clr column, all those "R" transactions are being ignored when the next month reconciliation begins, AND these "non-reconciled" transactions from the prior month are not showing up in this month's reconciliation transaction detail, essentially being ignored in two places. That is, NOT being included in the opening balance for this month's reconciliation and NOT being included as items to be reconciled this month? That's an odd state of affairs and might be due to some corruption of the file.

If that's the case then I thing the first thing you might try is to go back to those last month transactions, delete the "Rs" in the Clr column, then go back and manually enter those "R's" again, in the hope that shakes something loose. You might also try a validation and repair on the file to see if that works. Ultimately you might need to get in contact with Official Quicken Support, screen share, and let them look to see if they can spot anything you're doing wrong or suggest some other approach.