Quicken STILL creating bogus opening balance transactions

deliusfan

I found the other discussions of this oddly closed, like it's a verboten topic. But it happened to me yet again yesterday, when one of my credit cards was wildly off, and yet, exactly by the amount of the previous payment when I attempted reconcile. After eliminating a problem on Citi's end, I scrolled back about a month and noticed my credit card balance was strangely positive, and then I remembered to go back to the beginning of time on the account (more than 10 years ago, ahem) and, sure enough, there was the conveniently added opening balance for the exact amount of my payment last month (and not some nice, round figure that you could say was coincidental), all reconciled and ghosted grey.

In reading previous discussions, I found that having to reauthorize an account through the bank/credit card portal seems to be a trigger for these. And I remembered I did have to reauthorize Citi just this week. This needs to be flagged as a known bug and addressed. I have had these pop up about every two years or so, leading to me tearing my hair out trying to reconcile accounts, and then it's just a stupid programming mistake.

Please do not simply close this discussion. Please leave it open for future members to also add their comments until it gets fixed. Otherwise, why are we paying so much for a subscription to use the product?

Thank you.

Quicken Classic Deluxe R65.29, Windows 11 Home

Quicken Alyssa

Hello @deliusfan,

Thank you for sharing a detailed account of your experience with this issue. I am happy to hear you were able to resolve it!

You are correct, opening balance transactions being changed/added has been an issue in the past. Currently, this is not a known or widespread issue. As you stated, disconnecting and reconnecting accounts can be/was a trigger for this to occur.

Posts in the Community are closed after 30 days of inactivity. After they are closed, you can still view them, but no new comments can be posted to them. Just wanted to explain this process to eliminate any confusion with that.

A couple of things you can check:

• Where is your data file located?
  • You can see this by going to File. The first file listed at the bottom of the menu shows your file pathway/location.
• Is your file being backed up/synced by any third-party services like Dropbox, OneDrive, or Blackblaze?

You can also try validating your file to clear up/repair it.

To do this:

1. Save a backup.
2. Go to File.
3. Select Validate and Repair file…
4. Check the first box for Validate file.
5. Click Ok.

Once the validation has completed, it will produce a report of anything it has found/corrected.

Let us know what you find!

Chris_QPW

To my knowledge this problem has never been reported as fixed. It should still be a "known problem".

The problem comes up infrequently and as such has never been something that you can just look at the forum for a few days and say it is fixed.

I certainly wouldn't start mucking with my data file in an attempt to try to fix it.

As for closing of old threads. That doesn't in the least imply that something is fixed. Threads are closed because of the lack of activity for a given period of time.

Jim_Harman

@deliusfan As you have probably gathered, the issue of opening balances being changed when reauthorizing or reconnecting accounts has been going on for a long time. There have not been many reports recently, but as you have seen it has not been resolved.

One trick many of us have learned is to add the correct opening balance for each of your accounts as a Memo in the Opening Balance transaction. That way if an account does not reconcile, you can check to see if the opening balance has been changed and correct it if necessary.