More Immediate reconcile after "Accept All" downloaded transactions?

Joseph Witkin

My previous post on Feb 6, title above, is closed. My inquiry of how to get checking and savings accounts to auto-reconcile was successfully answered. The statement was confirmed that "brokerage (or any investment accounts) are unable to auto-reconcile".

Since I fixed all my checking and savings accounts, I find that my brokerage accounts are suddenly partially auto-reconciling. Under "Investment" accounts I have a brokerage account and 3 IRAs. Two of them immediately show the reconcile window when I accept downloaded transactions, and one of those automatically reconciles when I manually enter the current cash balance and click "OK" . The other does not - I have to click "Reconcile", where the window shows difference between online balance and Quicken balance is 0.00, and click to finish. The other two do not bring up the reconcile window at all until I click "reconcile".

Just wondering why these investment accounts behave differently from each other? I don't see any difference in settings. As was pointed out, the option for "auto reconcile" does not exist for these accounts.

Chris_QPW

I see that I didn't really make this clear in my post on your old question. There is a checkbox for turning this off and on in investment accounts:

But because of the bugs like you are seeing that is why I said that it hasn't really being supported.

You should turn this off for all your investment accounts. That should prevent the reconcile window from popping up. Not only does it only popup for the first investment account (I think it is the first one it puts the transactions into) and not the others. When you look at it, it is done at the wrong time. You need to first ensure that your shares are right and then go to the reconcile and it doesn't look like it does that. And to top it all off if it has never done "auto reconcile", it will always pop up the reconcile dialog and require you to press Done.

Joseph Witkin

Thanks. Interesting.

I see that I did have "reconcile using online balance" checked in 2 accounts and not the others - that explains my original question.

I have never seen errors with the semi-auto reconcile - it seems to only be looking at the cash balance, and I just enter the downloaded online cash balance as the "ending cash balance". I have never seen an error with updating share balances.

As I mentioned, I have a brokerage and 4 IRA accounts. They are all managed and contain an array of investments, so nearly daily there are dividends from one or more funds in all 5 accounts. Anything that would speed up reconciling would help!

Is it really unsafe to leave "reconcile using online balance" on? (I will do what you suggest!)

Thanks, Joe

Chris_QPW

At this point I can't remember if the "compare shares" was coming before or after they were popping up the reconcile window in the investment accounts.

Which comes first is very important (and I sort of remember them being backwards). The reconcile dialog is only about the cash, which doesn't tell the whole story in an investment account. The number of shares in each security is actually probably more important than the cash balance in a lot of cases.

So, what is the harm in running the cash reconcile before the comparing of the securities? The cash reconcile will set all your transactions from c to R. Now say you or Quicken runs the compare for the shares and it is wrong. You will now have a difficult time knowing which transactions are new and causing the problem, and which are old.

You could test which comes first by forcing a mismatch in your securities. Just put in a manual buy or sell of some shares of one of your securities, and then the next download that has transactions there will be a difference between what Quicken has and what was downloaded, and you can tell if Quicken will do the right thing in that case (just delete the manual transaction after the test get back to the right state).

If Quicken catches the incorrect shares before the cash reconcile, then there isn't any harm in leaving the reconcile to online balance on.

But there is also that bug that you mentioned, and I did too. When multiple investment accounts have downloaded transactions, the reconcile dialog only comes up for one of them, which might be frustrating.

Joseph Witkin

Thank you. Yes, I can see where that would be bad if the reconcile is unreliable for the share balance update. I unchecked the "reconcile using online balance" from all of my investment accounts - that's 10 extra clicks, 2 each for my 5 accounts, to reconcile. I would recommend this as a suggestion for Quicken to fix!