Credit card "cleared balance" (during reconcile) appears wrong, will not reconcile

M stich
M stich Member ✭✭
edited September 2022 in Errors and Troubleshooting (Windows)
Trying to reconcile a credit card account.
Credit card account reconciled last month (has monthly for years).
The sum of the charges (and individual charges) match the statement.
The sum of the credits (and individual credits) match the statement.
No fees or interest or anything else involved.
The balance is off by several hundred dollars.

{Removed-Speculation]
There are no unreconciled transactions from the past, although that never made a difference before.
Any idea how to fix this?
Mike
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Best Answers

  • Tom Young
    Tom Young Quicken Windows Subscription SuperUser ✭✭✭✭✭
    Answer ✓
    Glad you found it.  In all my years of using Quicken - starting in the days of DOS - I've only had that "opening balance got changed" problem once.  Like you it was well in the past and I'm sure that it wasn't anything I did that caused the problem.  You'd think the Hippocratic Oath of an accounting program would be "never touch the data" but it seems like that oath sometimes get violated.
  • Chris_QPW
    Chris_QPW Quicken Windows Subscription Member ✭✭✭✭
    Answer ✓
    There have been numerous postings of people's Opening Balance being changed.  Usually the trigger is Resetting the account for the online connection or deactivating/reactivating an account.

    The bug is that Quicken somehow thinks that the download it for the "first time".  When you first setup an account for downloading Quicken uses the online balance, minus the transactions downloaded to put in/change the Opening Balance transaction.

    I thought at one point they had a patch that fixed it, but I looked back at the release notes and can't find anything.
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Answers

  • Tom Young
    Tom Young Quicken Windows Subscription SuperUser ✭✭✭✭✭
    If you have characterized your situation correctly, that points to some "prior period" reconciled transaction being changed, e.g., deleted all together, its reconciled status changed, or the dollar amount changed.
    Quicken starts a reconciliation by summing up all the prior period entries that have "R" in the Clr column, and that's the opening balance for your reconciliation.  If a prior period reconciled transaction is somehow changed then your opening balance is wrong and even having correct "this period" charges and credits means you're not going to reconcile.
  • M stich
    M stich Member ✭✭
    So the question becomes how to fix it. I suppose one could go to a back up that reconciled correctly, like a month ago at least, and re-enter all the intervening transactions. A tedious and error prone process. Is there a better way to determine which reconciled transaction(s) got changed?

    I actually got lucky. A search for the exact amount of the error revealed that the "Opening Balance" transaction (the very first entry from 9 years ago!) got some how set to a non-zero number that exactly equaled the error. I verified this by opening a backup from a month ago. If some other random transaction amount got changed/deleted, this method will not work.

    It is physically so far back in the register (50+ entries per month for 9 years) that it is hard to believe that someone accidentally changed it. There was a Quicken update between then and now. Guess I'll never know.
  • Tom Young
    Tom Young Quicken Windows Subscription SuperUser ✭✭✭✭✭
    Answer ✓
    Glad you found it.  In all my years of using Quicken - starting in the days of DOS - I've only had that "opening balance got changed" problem once.  Like you it was well in the past and I'm sure that it wasn't anything I did that caused the problem.  You'd think the Hippocratic Oath of an accounting program would be "never touch the data" but it seems like that oath sometimes get violated.
  • Chris_QPW
    Chris_QPW Quicken Windows Subscription Member ✭✭✭✭
    Answer ✓
    There have been numerous postings of people's Opening Balance being changed.  Usually the trigger is Resetting the account for the online connection or deactivating/reactivating an account.

    The bug is that Quicken somehow thinks that the download it for the "first time".  When you first setup an account for downloading Quicken uses the online balance, minus the transactions downloaded to put in/change the Opening Balance transaction.

    I thought at one point they had a patch that fixed it, but I looked back at the release notes and can't find anything.
    Signature:
    This is my website: http://www.quicknperlwiz.com/
  • Boweevil
    Boweevil Quicken Windows Subscription Member
    I had the exact thing happen to me. Tech support has had me deactivate and reactivate to update transactions. The amount that wouldn't clear is the exact amount as my starting balance now on the program. It was exactly as you described. I have wasted so much time triple checking my transactions.
  • Len Verrett
    Len Verrett Quicken Windows Subscription Member ✭✭
    Fix: For several months, I had a credit card account that stopped working with automatic transaction download with one step update. I finally had time to troubleshoot and got it to re-connect. The re-activation process resulted in failing to reconcile due to an incorrect cleared balance. I went to the top of the transaction log and found an 'opening balance' entry that was cleared from the year 2010. I deleted that entry, and then I was able to reconcile cleanly. Not sure if a coincidence, but a Quicken patch was installed today also, the same day I re-activated the account. So, the fix was deleting the opening balance transaction even though it had been there for 12 years and never caused a problem previously.
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