Reconciling a Credit Card Account

When one reconciles a credit card account from a paper statement, Quicken askes for the user to input an amount for charges and/or cash advances and also for payments. While the reconciliation process requires some value to proceed, these numbers don't appear to be used in the reconciliation process once a value is entered. My question is does anyone know how these values are used, or were intended to be used in the reconciliation process?

Thanks in advance for helping me.

DKS
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Answers

  • Tom Young
    Tom Young SuperUser ✭✭✭✭✭
    All you really need to reconcile is to enter the ending balances. 
    Since you can run reports on your credit card Accounts that show Total Inflows (roughly, "payments") and Total Outflows (roughly, "purchases") my guess is that Quicken thought you might be able to compare the credit card statement numbers to the reports and that might assist you in where to go hunting if you can't reconcile.  Just a guess.
  • Tom,

    Thanks for the response. That is definitely an interesting perspective. This got me to thinking. Wonder if these inputs are somehow captures, stored, and then only used on the reconciliation report? I hope the Quicken Developers will join the discussion and share some insight. While not really a problem or a bug, this seems like an appendix, and creates an inefficiency in the program because it appears to be requiring two data inputs that don't appear to serve a purpose.

    DKS
  • Tom Young
    Tom Young SuperUser ✭✭✭✭✭
    I have no idea if those numbers are stored somewhere but they don't seem to be used, programmatically.  You can enter completely made up (wrong) number in those lines and Quicken doesn't notice that opening balance + charges - payments <> ending balance.  The programmers or developers might have had something in mind here, but if they did it didn't seem to get very far, if at all.
  • q_lurker
    q_lurker SuperUser ✭✭✭✭✭
    Tom,

    … I hope the Quicken Developers will join the discussion and share some insight. …

    DKS
    I suspect the only ‘developer’ who could offer insight would be Eric Dunn, CEO. Those fields have been around since the beginning as far as I know. 

    Also, developers never join these discussions. They have better things to do. (OK, Marcus on the Mac side is the exception.)
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