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A phantom/invisible transaction is throwing off my cleared balance. What can I do?

MWK8

I am using Quicken Classic for Windows, version R64.29. I have been a Quicken user for 35 years.

A few days ago, I downloaded transactions from my brokerage into an investment account, as I regularly do. When I went to reconcile the account, the "prior cash balance" shown in the reconcile window was significantly higher than the actual balance that I had last reconciled/cleared at the end of the prior month. For purposes of illustration, imagine the reported "prior cash balance" showing $10,000, but the actual balance when I had last reconciled/cleared was $8,500. So Quicken was showing a balance that was $1500 higher than reality.

I discovered that Quicken had downloaded a purported transaction from my brokerage and, without any action by me, marked that transaction as "R" (reconciled). [I say "purported" because the transaction never actually happened in the real world. I did not make the trade that the transaction purported to reflect. And I double-checked my brokerage account on the brokerage's website to confirm that it does not contain an entry for such a transaction.] Interestingly, the amount of this phantom transaction equaled EXACTLY 50% of the discrepancy in the prior cash balance. Using my example, the transaction showed a $750 inflow into my account (50% of the $1500 discrepancy). When you consider that the real discrepancy in my account was not actually a nice round number like $1500, but rather something more elaborate, I found this striking.

First, I uncleared the transaction (removed the "R"). Then, when I tried to reconcile again, I noted that the prior cash balance was now showing $9,250, still $750 higher than it should have been. Then, I just deleted the phantom transaction in its entirety. Unsurprisingly, that did not have an impact. The prior cash balance was still off by $750.

I scrubbed the register looking for a duplicate transaction but I couldn't find one. I used the Quicken report feature to look for transactions that could be causing the issue, but have not found any. I went back and checked the opening balance of the account (which I understand has triggered reconciliation issues for some Quicken users) but the opening balance checks out fine. I am confident there is no other transaction or series of transactions visible anywhere in the account (or, for that matter, in any other account in my Quicken file) that explains the discrepancy.

I believe somehow Quicken is recognizing an invisible transaction that I can't see in the register, but that Quicken is counting as "reconciled" for purposes of calculating the prior cash balance. I believe it is a duplicate of the phantom transaction that Quicken downloaded (the one that I uncleared and deleted). The fact that the amount of the remaining discrepancy is exactly equal to the amount of the phantom transaction is too precise to be a coincidence.

Has anyone encountered this issue and are you aware of anything I can do to fix it? For a variety of reasons, it would be massively painful to have to go back to a prior backup and start all over again.

Thanks very much.

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Tom Young

I'm also a Quicken user from the days of DOS and while I've encountered my share of problems over the years, I don't think I've ever encountered the one you describe.

I'd say that at this point it might be impossible to actually know where that phantom transaction came from. I suppose it could be some problem on the FI's side where their system slipped it into your account at the FI, Quicken happened to poll the account while that transaction was there, and the FI caught the mistake and fixed it shortly thereafter. This might be an issue to take up on the phone with Official Quicken Support

As to "fixing" things, since the remaining error is exactly half of the original total error and you're completely satisfied that there's no other phantom transaction accounting for the difference, that certainly sounds like it could be data corruption in the data file. It probably wouldn't hurt and might even fix things by trying a Validate and Repair on the file.

MWK8

Thanks very much, Tom. I forgot to mention that I also had run a Validate & Repair but that didn’t help either.

(And you maybe right that the brokerage was initially responsible for the phantom transaction. Not necessarily blaming Quicken for that. The problem is that the issue persists, in part, even after the phantom transaction was removed.)

I plan to call Quicken Support and we’ll see if there’s anything further they suggest.

Appreciate your taking the time to respond.

Gerry Blue

@MWK8 I am having the same sort of problem with a Merrill account that has been reconciling without issue since 2003. When I allowed Merrill & Quicken to move the connection method to ewc+, something weird happened with the cash balance and prior cash balance on reconcile. Now, I'm unable to reconcile with a difference of exactly $120.00. I've searched for transactions of $120 as well as $60 and $240 after reading your account. All of the transactions that fit the criteria are valid transactions that I recognize. Did your call(s) with support yield any solutions?

Quicken Kristina

Hello @Gerry Blue,

Thank you for letting us know that you're seeing this issue. If you haven't already done so, you may want to check if the discrepancy is being caused by an incorrect opening balance (while rare, sometimes the opening balance incorrectly changes when changing to Express Web Connect+ or reconnecting via Express Web Connect+, for more information, click here).

Depending on how long this issue has been going on for, restoring a backup from before the issue started may also be a viable option.

I look forward to your response!

Gerry Blue

Hello Kristina,

Thank you for the reply. I don't remember exactly when I made the transition to EWC+ in the Merrill account so I made a copy of my current QDF file and restored from January 1st of this year just to make extra extra sure I could compare the pre-migration opening balance with the current opening balance. Unfortunately (fortunately?) the opening balances in both files match to the penny.

I happened to notice in Edit > Preferences > Investments that there's an option for "Show hidden transactions". Just for kicks, I turned on that option to see what happens. Is there a handy way of identifying which transactions are hidden when that option is turned off?

Jim_Harman

The Show hidden transactions option turns on and off the display of Placeholders. When displayed, Placeholders will have a gray background in the account’s transaction list (register) even if they are not selected, and will have “Entry” in the Action column.

If you look in the tabs at the bottom of the investing transaction list, there is a Placeholder Entries tab, which will usually have a number after it indicating the number of Placeholders in the account, even if they are hidden. If you click on the tab, it will give a list of the placeholders in the account. I say "usually" because sometimes the number is not updated when it should be.

Placeholders compensate for missing, duplicate, or incorrect investing transactions by forcing Quicken’s share balance for a security to match a specified value on the date of the Placeholder. This is usually the share count downloaded from your financial institution (FI).

The Show hidden transactions option also reveals any cash balance adjustments that Quicken creates when you try to enter missing transactions that would affect the account's cash balance prior to the Placeholder date. I find these adjustments to be confusing and useless. The only way to get rid of them is to delete any Placeholders that have a later date than the entry you are trying to make.

Gerry Blue

@Jim_Harman Thank you. I do not have any placeholder transactions in the placeholder tab so I guess that option does not reveal anything that would help me with this situation.

@Quicken Kristina To try to narrow down the source of the problem, I restored from 9/2 since my last successful reconciliation was on 9/3. I clicked the reconcile button to see what it has for the prior cash balance. To my delight, it matches the prior cash balance on the 8/29 statement so I think it's safe to say that things went awry somewhere in September. I'll finish reconciling and perform an update - and presumably a migration to EWC+ - and see what happens. I'll let you know.

Quicken Kristina

Thank you for the follow-up,

I'm glad to hear that things are looking promising in the restored backup.

Please let me know how it goes!

Gerry Blue

Well, restoring from backup revealed a few things such as duplicate downloaded transactions and mis-dated transactions. Curiously, the transactions had been marked [R]econciled and thus threw off the prior cash balance by a total of $120. How they got to be marked that way is a mystery that will likely remain unsolved. Be that as it may, I'm now reconciled and all seems well again.

As is sometimes the case, it's a little too easy to blame Quicken for messing up my precious data when in fact the discrepancy is due to a PEBKAC. oops! My apologies. Thank you for pushing me to wander into the catacombs of my backups.

Quicken Kristina

Thank you for the follow-up,

I'm glad to hear that everything seems to be working correctly again.

If you need further assistance, please feel free to reach out!

Jim_Harman

Thanks for the update, @Gerry Blue.

I had to look up PEBKAC - Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair. Those haunt me sometimes too!