changing opening balance

TF

I was able to relink my target card again yesterday but noticed the balance was off because Quicken again changed the opening balance. I know there's been an issue for the past year. I went in to all my CC accounts and added a memo of OB 0 and also saw all the prev memos I made of changing opening balances. Just curious why Quicken would attempt to change the opening balance in the first place without notifying the user. I thought it was up to the user to reconcile the account. This kind of ongoing bug makes it difficult to recommend Quicken to non techie users.

Tom Young

"Just curious why Quicken would attempt to change the opening balance in the first place without notifying the user."

I have used Quicken from the early DOS versions. Initially and for a long, long time thereafter, all my downloading Accounts used the Direct Connect method. During that time of using DC, a period that easily numbered many thousands of downloads, I can only remember ONE instance where a download changed an Account's Opening Balance!

I think the adaptation of EWC and EWC+ coincided with the not-uncommon occasion of Opening Balances getting changed (silently) after a download. I don't know why that is and I don't think there's ever been any explanation from Quicken, that I know of.

Now I'm not a programmer, but to a non-programmer it would seem easy enough for the computer to discover that it's putting an entry in to an Opening Balance transaction - Quicken makes that entry and labels it "Opening Balance", after all. If you've ever had to change and Opening Balance entry to correct an change in the Opening Balance you know that you're challenged 3 times to make the fix: a caution that you're changing the Opening Balance, another caution that you're changing a Reconciled transaction, and then finally being forced to enter a password to complete the change, if you've "Set password to modify transactions…"

Not really an answer, just my opinion.

susie que

Changing Opening Balance:

I’ve been a Q user for over 20 years and I am not a techie-I only know only what I need to know. Everything worked well until the last 5 yrs or so when I experienced repeated problems with Reconciled Balances. At some point I was told it was because Quicken had been pulled into One Drive. But once it was taken out of One Drive, the problem persisted. I started putting the reconciled amounts in the Memo section. If an acct was reconciled one day and the next time that reconciled number had changed, it had to be a Q error, not mine, not that Q ever admitted it. 

In retrospect, I’m pretty sure when I called Q, techs usually changed the opening balance to make it work again, but not always. Sometimes they archived accounts so I no longer had access to historical data (like expenses paid repairing my house 5 yrs ago). I remember being on the phone a whole day with a Sr Tech setting up a whole new acct. All in all, it was a huge waste of my time on a product I paid for but wasn’t working. 

Today I was told to add a new entry just under the original Opening Balance. Call it New Op Bal  and enter the opening balance $ in this entry. I was told Q cannot change a manually added entry so this new entry should never change. Leave the original Opening Balance wording but zero out the amount. 

I’ve been here before and hoped I would never have to call Q back. Maybe this time it will work!

At least I hope so!