Reconciling Issues
I reconcile my credit card paper statements with my Quicken entries every month. On my credit card account in Quicken, I seem to have some "ghost" entries that show up as a total in my "cleared balance" on my reconcile window (in the area of $650). I have no corresponding entries in my quicken credit card account that account for this "ghost" number. All of the entries on my credit card statement are accounted for in my Quicken account - there are no other cleared entries in my quicken credit card acount, so I don't see where the Quicken reconcilation window pulls this number from. Accordingly, I cannot reconcile my credit card account because of this spurious entry that the reconciliation process has included in its calculation.
I recently transferred my Quicken account to a new computer. I have validated the quicken file, but that doesn't identify anything wrong with the quicken credit card account in the quicken file, so I am stuck at the moment trying to figure out where these "cleared" entries are that are affecting my account reconcilation. Anyone seen this before?
Thx.
Doug
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Hello @Doug Dubowski,
Thank you for letting us know you're running into this issue. If I'm understanding correctly, there are entries showing up in the Reconcile screen that are not present in the account in Quicken, nor do they show up on your paper statement. Are you willing to post a screenshot of the reconcile screen (with any personal information redacted) and specify which entries are the "ghost" transactions? If needed, please refer to this Community FAQ for instructions on how to attach a screenshot. Alternatively, you can also drag and drop screenshots to your response if you are not given the option to add attachments.
I look forward to your reply!
Quicken Kristina
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Here is a screen shot of the reconciliation page for the account in question:
The total of the charges in the left hand column match the statement charges. The payment in the payments column also matches the statement. The difference of $653.88 are the "ghost" entries that are cleared in the credit card account. However, there are no corresponding cleared entries in the account, but end up increasing the "Cleared Balance" number. No idea where these "ghost" entries are. The account was reconciled the month previously without any issues.
Another way to look at it - if I clear all the entries in the left hand column in the reconciliation pane, the "Cleared balance" number becomes $653.88, indicating I have some extra cleared entries in the account, but there are none there - hence the "ghost entries".
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You are assuming that the erroneous Cleared Balance is caused by a "ghost" cleared transaction. In my experience, the more likely scenario is that a previously reconciled transaction was altered after the prior month's reconciliation.
The Cleared Balance in Quicken reflects all previously reconciled transactions. Thus, if a previously reconciled transaction was inadvertently changed, that will affect the Cleared Balance. Hence, I would start by checking the following:
- If you save a PDF copy of a Reconciliation Report each time you reconcile your credit card (as I do), you can compare the Reconciliation Report from last month's reconciliation to the Quicken register to confirm that nothing has changed.
- If your don't save a Reconciliation Report for each account reconciliation, then I would compare the prior month's credit card statement to the register - going back to the date of that prior statement. You may need to sort the register by Posting date or do some math to complete this step to ensure that you aren't including transactions that are now cleared, but hadn't cleared at the time of the statement.
If you determine that some previously reconciled transaction has changed, I recommend first checking the opening balance for that account. As discussed in other threads, there is a bug in Quicken that results in Quicken inadvertently changing the opening balance of an account. When this has happened to me, it seems to be in proximity to an application version update. If the issue is not caused by an opening balance change, then, unfortunately, you'll have to work backwards through the months to find the reconciled transaction that was altered after your prior month's reconciliation. Of course, accidentally deleting a transaction would have the same affect.
Another option is to restore a backup file, but that has implications… and if it is an opening balance issue I'm not sure whether Quicken would change the opening balance as part of the restore operation. I've never tried fixing the opening balance issue with a backup restoration.
Please post back as to whether this is helpful and if you are able to find a previously reconciled transaction that was deleted or altered since your reconciliation.
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Thanks for the feedback. Checked the opening balance - no issue there. I went back to the previous statement - it balances. If there is an entry that has changed previous to that, will have to check each statement one by one. I thought if you changed or deleted a reconciled entry, you get a warning window indicating you are changing a reconciled entry. I don't recall ever getting such a warning. Anyway, will have to go through each statement individually I guess. Have created my own ghost entry to get the last statement to balance in the meantime.
I still wonder if moving the file from the old computer to the new computer has caused the problem. Not sure if the validation function would pick this up though. Not aware of any other process within Quicken that can check this.
Doug
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If you've confirmed that the previously reconciled statement still reconciles, then you don't need to check earlier ones. Any issue from an earlier date would reflect forward to present.
What happens if you try a manual reconciliation. I mean, simply doing a "paper" reconciliation from the register. Or, export the transactions to Excel and try a reconciliation there. In other words, which cleared balance gets replicated when you do it manually - the one that Quicken shows in the Reconciliation window or that from your statement.
The formula for Cleared Balance is:
Previous Balance (typically negative)
+ Checks and Payments (typically negative)
+Deposits and other Credits (typically positive)
+ Service Charge (typically negative)
+ Interest (typically negative)
My earlier post was based on the hypothesis that the "Previous Balance" that Quicken is using is not what appears on your CC statement. This is easy to check - simply start the reconciliation process and the dialogue box that opens will tell you the "previous balance" and ask you to enter the new statement balance. Changing a previously reconciled transaction, including the opening balance, does affect the "Previous Balance". If you have confirmed that Quicken has the correct "Previous Balance" and that Quicken's previous balance matches the previous balance on the statement then my hypothesis was wrong. Any changes to previously reconciled transactions would necessarily affect what Quicken reports as the previous balance.
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One additional suggestion that is occasionally helpful. Do a universal search (upper right corner) for a transaction that has the exact value of the difference of $653.88. This is a bit of a long shot, but it could be helpful if there was one rogue transaction.
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I tried the rogue transaction search - nothing came up. The last three months of statements before this problematic one all balance as well. Am now checking the previous balances on the credit card statements. Went back to Aug 2023, all is good there, but there is now a discrepancy in the Nov 23 statement.
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Problem solved. I had a number of duplicated entries in late 2023 that caused the problem. To Arctic Hare, thanks for your help. Greatly appreciated,
Doug
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Could the problem be "Pending Entries" on your bank/CC company statement that the bank/cc company clears from their register. However these cleared entries never get downloaded into your Quicken data…because they are not there any longer. I believe there is a setting in Quicken to ignore "Pending Entries". Perhaps a Super User could comment on this.
CB
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I've never used the option to download pending entries because I don't see the utility in doing so. If I want to see pending transactions, I can view them from the bank's app on my phone. Nonetheless, if pending entries were downloaded and accepted into the register, they should then appear in the reconcile window as cleared but unreconciled transactions. That was not the case here. So, no, I don't believe this particular issue had anything to do with downloading pending transactions.
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The problem was associated with a download from my bank that imported a number of old transactions. Don't know why it happened, but I had a series of old transactions show up in my Quicken account. I thought I got rid of them all, but there may have been some I missed. I could see them because these duplicated entries had no categories assigned to them. I categorize every transaction and enter it into my Quicken account as they happen. When I download trasactions from my bank, it is mostly a matching activity in Quicken, but there are some I miss. It created some problems for me in trying to track down the issue I was having. Some transactions at the end of the reporting period don't show up on the statement until the next reporting period, but are recorded in Quicken as occurring before the end of the reporting period. Will have to think about a better way of doing it. I also don't use the "pending transactions" feature when downloading transactions because I generally enter transactions in Quicken as they occur.
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Ah-hah! I think I know what is causing your issues. Please answer the following two questions:
- Which financial institution and credit card is in play here? e.g. BMO Mastercard.
- Are you downloading transactions using Express Web Connect (i.e. One Step Update) or Web Connect (by logging into the financial institution's online banking site)
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CIBC Visa and Web Connect
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Interesting. Not the answer I was expecting. In my experience, the issue with the reconcile window not including the exact correct transactions for period is always caused by incorrect posting dates being downloaded from the financial institution; i.e. the posting date that is downloaded is different from what you see on the bank's portal and different from what appears on the monthly statement. In my experience, this only happens when one uses Express Web Connect. I get wrong posting dates from RBC and BMO if I use Express Web Connect, so I reverted to using Web Connect, which provides me with consistently correct posting dates. Nonetheless, you might want to check whether your challenges with reconciliation are caused by discrepancies in posting dates. If the posting dates are correct, you shouldn't experience the reconciliation issues you've described… which leads me to wonder what is going on?
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I have never looked at the posting dates within the bank's processes. I have just assumed they are all the same. If there are some date discrepancies between my entries and what the downloaded bank transactions are, I can sort through them in reconciliation. This weird occurance I had with some spurious downloaded entries is still a mystery. The transactions in questions were dated in Oct and Nov 2023, but showed up in my download this month. It was also only a few of my monthly transactions, not all of them. I just hope it doesn't happen again!
Thanks for your help.
Doug
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It is possible to get duplicate transactions downloaded if, for some reason, the banks system generates a new Transaction ID (i.e. "Downloaded ID") for those transactions. The "Downloaded ID" is the unique, primary key that (when all goes right) avoids duplicate transactions in the downloaded data.
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