how to get credit card accounts back into balance

klchilds

this is my second post on this - cannot seem to find the 1st one.

during citibank snafu bad things happened to my credit card registers. they were never in balance any longer with the bank. i tried reconciling and the adjustments were over 5K !!! i have since researched a bit and found many duplicate records in the register. got rid of those and i am still way off…..i have considered reloading the accounts from scratch but that would make me lose the personalization of the entries that I do after the downloads…….HELP !! cant trust quicken balances at this point………..

klchilds

am hoping some guru here can solve this for me

Bob_L

By "researched" I assume you have manually reviewed statements to see if anything pops out? Only thing I can offer is that there have been cases where opening balances somehow get changed to something else. Please check that. (We recommend that folks put the opening balance in the memo field of the opening account transaction as a way to know what it should be in case this happens)

klchilds

both of my citibank cards are so far out of balance. the one that is used most is now $4700 off says reconcile. the other one that isnt used as much reconciles with a $500 adjustment. have looked everywhere I can think of to solve this ongoing item……think i will try to just live with my adjustments for awhile and see if it continues to get out of whack with the bank. have reconciled credit cards since forever and never had such a problem. having used quicken for decades I have to say these anomalies of late with the bank downloads are a bit alarming…..have noticed double posting every once in awhile too. I would start over with new accounts and go forward but so much of it is tailored to my accounting methods….ugh….

klchilds

having perused many citibank issues here on this site that deal with citibank and quicken for at least the last six months. some are saying reconciliation isnt possible….some have been told it must be opening balance and many others still having problems with the citibank connections. All of the discussions found are marked "closed" I am now thinking that means CLOSED WITHOUT RESOLUTION.

This is the first big glitch i have had that remains unsolved and i have been using quicken since 1996.

Are there other means in the support of quicken that can help us finally solve this ? Am wondering when this topic will be closed for discussion too

klchilds

So its been two weeks from the last post. Is no one else experincing this problem ? It would seem an application that considers itself a personal finance application would treat this more on an urgent basis. It is disappointing and alarming that no one has any good solutions for this problem. Current status is main citibank credit card is way off by thousands and the least used citibank is about 500 off. I used reconcile to create a misc adjustment to allow me to have at least a tentative view of my credit card balances - the alarming part is the adjustment is growing…..HELP

Bob_L

Is your FI set to Citibank or Citi cards? I have had no problem with .EWS+ and I use Citi Cards as the FI. Have you run a File validation since your problems began? Have you tried resetting the account?

UKR

As mentioned by others, …

• make sure the Opening Balance transaction in your accounts is correct. The process of activating/(re-)authorizing an account may cause the OB transaction to get incorrectly modified. Yes, that's a bug. Review and fix. Be sure to note the correct OB balance amount in the transaction's Memo field … in case this happens again.
• If you have created Balance Adjustment transactions: Delete all of them.
• Obtain hardcopy of the monthly bank statements for all of last year.
• Look back through your account register in Quicken and compare each month's bank statement Ending Balance to the Running Balance in Quicken on that date. Go back in time, month after month, until you find a correctly matched amount.
• Now go forward in time and compare the bank statement transactions to the register, one by one. Delete duplicate transactions. Insert missing transactions. Edit incorrect register transaction amounts so it matches the statement.
  Be sure to put pencil checkmarks on each statement transaction that you have compared to the register.
• When you're done with one month's transactions, the register balance on that date must match the bank statement Ending Balance. If it doesn't, keep looking, you missed something.
• Lather, rinse and repeat … proceed to the next month until you have completed resolving all problems and have processed all statements until the December 2024 statement.
• You're now ready to reconcile January 2025 transactions when the month has ended and you receive the next monthly bank statement.

klchilds

in answer to Bob_l:

I wish I could understand your last message. What is an FI? could that be financial institution? am guessing.

I looked around quicken on the two citibank accounts and neither tell me whether it is citibank or city cards. I access both via separate sign ons on their website citi.com…

Your thoughts ?

klchilds

In answer to UKR:

that certainly sounds like a lot of work. I am not totally sure when this problem actually hit my accounts and one of the reasons I have chosen not to just start from scratch with a new download and create a new account. I have a lot of historical records that have been hand-updated by me over the years and I would not like to go back and re-update from scratch.

I noticed this problem when we were having so much trouble with citibank downloads. In that situation I had reconciled all the transactions because I had missing and duplicated transactions when the downloads actually executed.

klchilds

okay gang……now I am gong to add one more clue……I am finding some of my checking accounts have a little balance issue as well. I do reconcile my accounts fairly regularly. A checking account I discovered today was about $1500 off. Unfortunately this is making me distrust all quicken balances….a tough situation if you rely on your personal finance application, one would think

Bob_L

The FI, financial institution, is shown on the account list(CTL A). Have you validated your file recently? (File, validate and repair).

klchilds

no…have not tried the validate and repair or the reset on these accounts…..which would you recommend first ? and….what will they do or try to do to my data….

Bob_L

I would try resetting to prevent future problems…should not affect your existing data but always a good idea to backup first. If the problem continues then try a validate & repair to rule out file corruption, backing up first. You could also do a super validate afterwards by holding CTL and shift when clicking repair. Validation can cause some data losses if it finds problems but it is often recommended here anyway.

klchilds

Here is the status of this issue for me: I have now repaired and validated my main citibank credit card. It did not appear to do anything profound. So, I went back to reconcile and forced a Balance Adjustment of some 8.6K. ugh ! it would be great if at least the balance adjustment would stay consistent. So, I am going to try to just leave this account with its adjustment and only do downloads and see where I go with this…..Scary that it is such a big number.

The additional steps I have done these last few weeks are to find and purge obviously duplicate records in these files. Also, since I do my payment to the credit card company via a transfer, sometimes the transfer amount does not match exactly on amount so there are two - got a few of those out as well.

The conversation about the pending transactions being included in reconciliation was helpful.

So, we will see if this is at least stabilized….

Bob_L

Don't forget to put the opening balance amount in the memo field of the credit card's opening balance transaction as a way to verify that it has not been changed if things start acting up again.

klchilds

I have no opening balance on the credit card accounts