Incorrect Balance in Account Bar for Investment Accounts

leishirsute

Not sure why this was closed:

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7959754/ending-balance-and-current-balance-in-account-list-display-includes-reminder-transactions

However, some additional info. It appears that for recurring (monthly, for example) scheduled transactions that have not posted to an investment account, the accumulated scheduled amounts are included in the account's balance in the Account Bar. Therefore, the account balance in the Account Bar can be way off if there are many pending past recurring transactions. Please fix this.

Jim_Harman

@leishirsute When you say "scheduled transactions that have not posted to an investment account" do you mean you have accepted the Reminder but it has not downloaded yet?

And are you referring to ordinary Reminders, for dividends for example, or to investing Scheduled Transaction groups?

leishirsute

@Jim_Harman I am referring to ordinary dividend reminders.

For example, from my test.qdf file, all accounts have $0.00 balance as shown in the Home tab. Yet the Account Bar shows the Brokerage Test account has an ending balance of $2000.00, which is totally incorrect.

Drilling into the Brokerage Test account. The account has $0.00 balance in the register, but has overdue scheduled monthly dividends which appear to have been added to the Account Bar balance for each month overdue:

Add up the Brokerage Test scheduled transactions and they equal $2000.00 in Ending Balance or $1700 in current balance on the Account Bar. These scheduled transactions have never been posted.

It seems to me that the programmer for the Account Bar incorrectly used unposted scheduled transactions amounts in the Current and Ending balance amounts when they should have just used future dated posted transactions for Ending Balance and "as of" current date posted transactions for Current balance.

This is very confusing behavior in the Account Bar.

I hope this helps to explain the issue.

Jim_Harman

@leishirsute Thanks for pointing this out. I seldom have overdue Reminders in investing accounts, but I see the same issue in R62.16. I would state the problem this way:

Overdue Income and Bill Reminders in investing accounts are included in the account's balance in the Account Bar but not in the account's Current Balance at the bottom of the Transaction list, in the Account Overview (Holdings view) or in reports.

This is incorrect behavior. Only transactions that have been entered into an investing account's Transaction List should be included in the Account Bar balance.

In Banking accounts, there is an option to include Reminders in the register, but if this option is selected, Reminders correctly affect both the register's current balance and the Account Bar balance, so the balances remain in sync.

Steps to reproduce:

1. Note the Current Balance at the bottom of an account's Transaction List and the balance in the Account Bar. They should be the same.
2. Create a monthly income or bill reminder for an investing account and set the starting date several months ago. This will create several overdue reminders.
3. Observe that in the account's balance in the Account Bar has changed by the total amount of the overdue reminders but because the Reminders have not been entered into the account's Transaction List, the Current Balance at the bottom of the Transaction List does not change.