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Reconcile shows wrong previous amount

John Reagan

While catching up on my reconciliations, my last month was Jan 2026 with an ending balance of 35,669.03. That's what is on my bank statement and what the last grey'ed transaction line.

I was going to reconcile my Feb 2026 statement (yes, I'm a few months behind) and see a "prior balance" of 18,469.03. What the heck? I've never seen that number before.

I'll try to just provide a new value, but there is something really screwy going on.

R69.26

[Edited - Readability]

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Comments

John Reagan

Looking closer, there were 3 deposits (transfers from my Fidelity accounts) from 2024 that were not reconciled. But of course, they were reconciled back in 2024 when I balanced my bank & Fidelity statements. I forced the correct starting balance, confirmed the 3 deposits from 2024, and finished the Feb reconcile. Seems ok so far, but I did do a backup before all of this.

NotACPA

"Prior Balance" in a banking account reconciliation is a calculated, not stored, amount. It's the sum of ALL transactions (past and future) in the account that have an "R" in the CLR column.

If you're manually changing that CLR value, your also, even if unintentionally, changing that Prior Balance amount.

John Reagan

Thanks. So the "R" went missing on those old deposits. I don't see how I could have "accidentally" un-reconciled 3 different transfers from 3 different months in 2024, but whatever. Seems ok for now.

Sceptic

@John Reagan a reconciled transaction in Quicken Windows only loses the R when something changes the reconciliation baseline. The most common causes are:

• The transaction was edited (amount, date, category, memo, split, or Clr field).
• The Opening Balance transaction changed — even by a penny.
• A balance adjustment was added, edited, or deleted.
• Cloud Sync (Mobile/Web) rewrote the register or changed the opening balance.
• A backup was restored from before the reconciliation.
• File corruption from a crash or unexpected shutdown.

Quicken doesn’t spontaneously unreconcile transactions, but any change to the data used to compute the reconciliation history will cause Quicken to drop the R.

mshiggins

@Sceptic the only items from your list that would trigger removal of the reconciled R status from transactions would be if the Clr field was edited, cloud sync overwrote data, or file corruption. The other items on your list could certainly change the reconciled account balance, but not the reconcile status of transactions.

John Reagan

Thanks. I can't think of anything that I did but I'll rack it up to something I did.

Chris_QPW

Considering I expect most people to have this setting:

And the result is this when changing the reconcile status:

I suspect that you didn't change the reconcile status, it is more likely Quicken "did" as @mshiggins stated.

And these days even trying to change the Clr/Reconcile status is a multiple click operation, something one doesn't do accidentally.

q_lurker

FWIW: I just went through a sequence where I changed a SoldX in an investment account to a Sold with a separate XOut to the transfer account. That deleted the original reconciled transaction in the receiving account and created a new (now unreconciled) transaction in the receiving account. In essence, my actions caused Quicken to do something very similar to your situation.

The remedy of course was the add the R status to the transaction in the receiving account.