Changing the date from which ending balance is calculated?

Question

Version: Quicken Classic Premiere for Windows R63.21

I started to use Quicken late in the fall of 2024. At that time, my bank only made the current quarter available for Quicken updating and viewing online, with one previous quarter available as a download packet. I had to manually enter deposit/payment information off PDF bank statements for the rest of the year. Mistakes were made! But what I needed for my tax purposes was there and was correct. I have tried to locate the problems among all the manual entries; I found some but clearly not all. I don't want to do it anymore.

Now I'm stuck with an online balance and ending balance that are extremely different (pending transactions removed).

* Question: Is it possible to set a specific new opening date (Jan 1, 2025) from which to calculate the ending balance that ignores the previous entries/year, without deleting those previous year's entries? I haven't been able to locate an answer.

My main use for Quicken is as a (much better) alternative to my bank's online interface, and the difference in the balance has gotten wearing. If the only option is to delete all of 2024, I can do that if there's some way to save it all in a usable format elsewhere. I haven't figured out how to do that.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions on this.

Chris_QPW · Answer

Ok, it sounds like there was a confusion of what balance you were talking about.  I thought you were saying that your Quicken reconcile wasn't balancing, and that is what you wanted to adjust.

Are you reconciling to what you have typed in, or the downloaded online balance?

Note when the account is setup for downloading transactions there are three balances at the bottom of the register.  The Online Balance, Current Balance and the Ending Balance.  The Online Balance is downloaded and can't be changed.  If the financial institution is doing the right thing it should include all the cleared transactions and all those cleared transactions should have been downloading into the register.

The Current Balance is just the Quicken register balance for today.  The Ending Balance will include any future transactions if they exist, otherwise it will be the same as the Current Balance.

EDIT: You said that the ending balance keeps growing.  The only reason it should keep growing is if new transactions are being added to the register.  Is it growing without any new downloaded transactions?

VWest · Answer

I was hopeful this could do it. After reconciliation, Quicken informed me the account balances, so it didn't offer an option to choose the online balance instead. Evidently I did find all the manual entry problems, and they weren't at fault (which is a bit of a relief), but it leaves me with a mystery.

That ending balance keeps growing and is now several thousand dollars more than my actual online balance (hence bothering me). Since I can't figure out why it's like that or find any option to remove it from the screen, I guess I'll just keep trying to ignore it.

Thanks so much for this suggestion. If I'd correctly identified the problem to begin with, it would have worked for me.

Quicken Jasmine · Answer

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7965169/changing-the-date-from-which-ending-balance-is-calculated

Thanks for reaching out!

@Chris_QPW is correct, and I do agree with his advice.

Please let us know if this assists you!