Deleting Many "Orphaned" Entries Never Cleared During Reconciles (Q Mac)

Question

Over the years, I've accumulated a couple of hundred of 'em. Because they never cleared, deleting them shouldn't change the reconciliation. But with the long series of successful reconciliations, I'm nervous. Here's what I did on one checking account in a copy of my file:

1.) Select "not cleared"

2.) Do an inclusive select (Shift/Click at the beginning and end of list)

3.) Click the Trash icon.

Is this safe to do?

TIA

jacobs · Answer

It seems like it should be safe to delete transactions which never cleared. I'm having a hard time thinking of why you'd have hundreds of uncleared transactions, but perhaps it's not relevant. Isn't your running account balance in Quicken off by hundreds or thousands of dollars because of all these transactions which never took place?

If these were checks you wrote which were never cashed, I prefer to edit the transaction to record "Void" + the check amount + a reason in the Memo field, and change the transaction Amount to zero; then I include these $0 transactions in my next reconciliation. But if you have hundreds of transactions, that might not be worth the effort if you don't want a historical record of the missing checks.

As you stated, I'd make sure to do a backup before doing this, so you can revert if something unexpected happens!

Deleting the transactions will change one part of your existing reconciliations, but it may not matter to you. If you go to Reconciliation History, click on any reconciliation, and click on the View or Print icon, the last part of the reconciliation report is a list of Uncleared Transactions as of the time of the reconciliation. Deleting the uncleared transaction now should not throw your reconciliation history out of balance, because these transactions were never reconciled. I just did one quick test, it appears that the uncleared transaction remains in the reconciliation history report even after the transaction is deleted. I don't think this would be a problem for anyone unless you were trying to purge any historical record of having created and later deleted the transaction.

NotACPA · Answer

Take a backup first … just in case, and then see for yourself what happens.

BUT, before that I'd look closely into WHY they were never reconciled.  Deleting any transaction, that has a non-zero amount, is going to impact the accounts balance … so I'd have to question how you're "reconciling".