Why did my Beginning Balance change when I try to reconcile

trish@

I entered my January '25 transactions and when I tried to reconcile Quicken brought up my beginning balance $500 more than it should be. Why? What can I do?

Boatnmaniac

Is your account set up for downloading the transactions?

If so, have you done anything that modified that connection, such as deactivate/reactivate, Reset, reauthorize, Add Account or Set Up Now?

If so, it is a known issue that sometimes this will cause the Opening Balance transaction dollar amount to be changed. A proactive step that can be taken (and is recommended): For all connected Spending accounts (i.e., checking, savings, credit cards, etc.) enter and save the Opening Balance transaction dollar amount into the Memo field of the transaction. This will not prevent the issue from occurring but it makes it very easy and fast to identify when it has occurred and to know how to fix it.

There is another issue that sometimes happens when modifying the connection method: Some duplicate transactions get entered into the Account Register. If there is an Account Register balance issue and if fixing the Opening Balance does not resolve it, you should scroll backward from the current date looking for duplicate transactions. If any are found, delete one of the transactions and retain the other. If this issue occurs, it is most likely that dupes will show up within the last 90 days.

trish@

Thanks so much for your comments! I have had alot of trouble getting transactions downloaded, my bank is a small local bank, and when I download the files come as OFX instead of QFX and my bank doesn't know how to convert them. So I gave up on that….

So, probably from what you are saying trying to do that somehow messed up my opening balance. There is one transaction that is missing - its a transfer from this checking account to a savings account - I just record it as a expense - but now the program has deleted the January one. If I go in and try to add it back then how can I show it was reconciled? I'm so confused!

Boatnmaniac

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20534763#Comment_20534763

OFX (Open Financial Exchange) is a standard file format used by banks and financial institutions to securely transfer transaction data, statements, and, in some cases, investment information to personal finance software but it cannot be imported into Quicken.

QFX (Quicken Financial Exchange) is pretty much the same as OFX but with some additional information, making it proprietary, that Quicken needs in order to be able to import it. If your bank wants to give customers the opportunity to download in a QFX file, then they will need to contact Intuit (the aggregator) and contract with them to add support for QFX. Intuit (and Quicken?) will work with them on how to correctly format the QFX file.

Since your bank does not offer downloading in QFX files, you could download the OFX file and then convert it into a QIF file format that can then be imported into Quicken. One such free conversion program is ImportQIF which was developed and is maintained by a long time Quicken user who is still very active in this Community. This conversion program can also convert some Excel, CSV and other QIF files. If you are interested, you can read up on it and download it from https://www.quicknperlwiz.com/ . It's a safe application…no adware, no malware, etc….just the application.

Regarding the transfer transaction from checking to savings: The way to record these is to use the correct transfer category, not an income or expense category. The correct transfer category, if the transaction is entered into the checking account, would be the name of the savings account enclosed in bracket like this: [name of savings account].

Or if the transaction is entered into the savings account the transfer category would be [name of the checking account].

Then if this creates a duplicate transaction in either of the accounts, just delete that transaction that does not have the transfer category in it.

When done you can mark the transaction(s) as reconciled by Right Click on the transaction > Reconcile Status > Reconciled.

Does this answer your questions?