My account list shows a balance on an account with a zero balance

I'm a bit confused as to which thing you are referring to as any given time, but I will talk about this in general and hopefully hit on what is wrong.

In the real world what is going to be happening is a transfer from the old account to the new account. My preference in this case would be to mimic the real world, but it isn't the default of how it will most likely be recorded by Quicken.

In other words, I would deactivate the old account for downloading, then add the new account which will put in an opening balance which should be the same amount that is the ending balance of the old account. I would change the category to from [New Account] to [Old Account]. When you are in “New Account” and have a transaction with a category of [New Account] that is a balance adjustment transaction. By changing it to [Old Account] that makes it a transfer between the two accounts.

The other way of going at this is two balance adjustments. The Opening Balance transaction in the new account like I just mentioned and another in the old account to zero it out.

Note if you close the old account Quicken should do a few things for you. It should deactivate the account for downloading transactions, remove any reminders for that account, and add that balance adjustment transaction to zero out the account. And select the option to hide the account in the transaction entry lists.

I don't like the close process for a few reasons, and prefer to do it manually. My reasons are.

• You can't undo it.
• There have been reported bugs where the account isn't properly deactivated for downloading transactions, but since it is closed you can't easily fix it.
• It will remove the reminders for that account that you might have just wanted to change to using the new account.