Quicken Classic on Windows R67.7
I am a multi-decade user of Quicken and I have noticed a severe mismatch between my account registers and the values shown in a number of reports. For example, the Account Balances report would show wildly different numbers for several accounts. For example, I have one checking account that was closed and showed a $0 balance in the register, but showed a current balance of -$10,000. I searched the community for fixes and found nothing that would impact it.
I recently saw something that made me look into how the two running values are created. The register is simply an accumulation of the net value of each transaction. The account balance report, however, does it differently! It creates the running value from the sum of all of the split values. In theory, these should give the same numbers.
I created two transaction reports, one as single records for each transaction and one with the splits exposed. When I added a current value for each I could see the values start to drift apart. This helped identify the exact transactions that were causing the problems. What I found was that some of my paycheck transactions did not have proper split values. Summing the full set of splits gave a different number than the transaction was showing as the net value. I don't know how this happened, but I had dozens of them with each one making my reports get further and further from reality. I was able to go back to old records and recreate approximate values for the splits so that now the net value in the transactions agree with the sum of the splits. This resolved the problem and I can finally start to count on accurate results in the reports.
