Hours spent running down a Qucken error I've never seen before

Hi all:

I run a fairly complicated monthly and year-to-date budget report that pulls information from only *some* of the accounts in my Quicken file and that excludes unrealized investment gain. I also prepare an accompanying balance sheet that limits itself to the same accounts as the budget report and also excludes unrealized gain. I always check to see that the budget report's "bottom line" is correct by comparing it to the change in equity as calculated off the beginning and ending balance sheets since it's easy to forget to add a new account or category to one or the other reports.

This month my "proof" was off by a considerable amount and in working through why this was so I found that I'd neglected to update the reports properly for a couple of new accounts. However, even after fixing this I was still of by quite a bit.

After lots of report running, head scratching and so on I found two transactions that added up to the number remaining to be reconciled. The two transactions were deposits of independent contractor income into one of my Schwab brokerage accounts. One deposit was a split transaction and one was not. The deposits properly showed up in the register as increasing the account's cash. Subsequent transfers of the checks' amounts to other accounts showed up properly as reductions in cash in the brokerage account and increases in cash in checking and savings accounts. The deposits were showing up in the budget report as income. What the heck could be wrong?

It finally dawned on me that the summary cost basis figure showing up for the Schwab brokerage account in the balance sheet was *excluding* the deposits in its calculations! I could prove this was so by running a Portfolio Value report for this account (this report give the cost basis for each security and cash in the account) for any date after the deposit and comparing the total to the summary number reported by a Net Worth report with the same date. At any date before the deposits the two reports had the same totals and at any date after the deposits the report totals differed by the amount of the deposits.

Validation of the file did nothing to fix this.

You'd think that deleting and re-entering the deposits would correct the error, but obviously the problem was somehow buried in the Memorized Payee information as deletion and re-entering resulted in the problem re-appearing. It was only after deleting the memorized information and then re-entering the deposits as non-split transactions was the situation finally resolved.

Very weird.

Tom Young

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TomYoung
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Very interesting resolution, seemingly somehow tied to the Memorized Payee. I have just had a weird thing happen and have yet to figure out how to fi x it.

I bought a stock and entered it into the brokerage account which is linked to a cash account. The cost of the stock appeared in the cash account corr ectly and the stock was correctly listed in the stock portfolio. The cost basis of the portfolio was correctly updated to include the purchase. The problem arose when I ran a balance sheet and found that the amount of the p urchase was not included in the asset column. However two other purchases made the same week were included. This put my balance out by the amount of the purchase. I deleted the transaction and re-entered with the error con tinuing to appear. I run a duplicate copy of Quicken on another computer a nd the same error occurred there. I am running Quicken 2013 which is being phased out and wonder if that could be the problem. I do not use the down load abilities of Quicken, preferring to enter all data myself. Keeps me f ocused on my investments. Any ideas on how to fix it or what could be caus ing it? Can't find anything online.

Thanks, Jerry

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farragoyo

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