error generated

Despite the fact that I know of certain problems Quicken has caused ... I do not worry about "where esle might such strange things have happened" ... because I do not expect perfection (humans are known to be imperfect ... both users and creators of software). If I reconcile my accounts regularly; I believe "strange things" can't sneak in without my knowledge.

You should have confidence in the fact that you reconcile your accounts, and trust in your ability to do that. There is no software application I know of (including software that I have written) that I would trust to provide flawlessly accurate data, without that data being "reconciled".

John You are right in that I did catch it and probably would again if it occurred in another accept so I am not overly concerned. My point is that after 8 years of reconciling a error crept in at time zero and this baffles me. Mel

I wish that there was some way to determine how such things happen ... but I think only much more expensive software would provide the sort of audit trail you would need to determine how/when such "changes" occurred (and even that software would be subject to failure to note the cause).

For me, knowing how the problems might occur (including my errors, software errors, and the unexpected - such as a power outage) tells me that I must do regular reconciles as the only way to catch any of those possibilites ... and that I will most likely never know which of those possibilities was responsible for a problem I might find. [After the fact, I think, in some cases the software developer will report a problem in the product that was involved in "undoing" a reconcile, and fix the problem. But my observation/experience is that it is extremely difficult to diagnose this type of problem, if it is a bug ... and virtually impossible to prevent, if not a bug.]

One thing that I do wish Q had (maybe there is such information that is being maintained for internal debugging purposes?) is a audit trail of changes being made to the database. I realize that Q is relatively simplistic in the database functions...but more sophisticated dbs maintain a log so that one can rollback (or forward) a series of changes from a particular point. That sort of information in some human-readable form (even if not able to be programmatically applied to an old copy of the qdf) would have helped me on occasions in the past.

Have you ever entered a transaction, heard the kaching sound, then realized what you just did is not what you think you modified, but not you have no way of knowing what you just changed??

That sounds like the "audit trail" I mentioned in my previous post.

I would be happy to make use of such a "log" if it were present.

But I keep backups of my last 7 uses of Quicken plus at least a month's worth of Quicken's "weekly" automatic backups. If I really need to know what a transaction looked like before I changed it, or deleted it, or what my account looked like sometime in the past; I can usually restore a backup to a temporary folder and lookup the transaction there.

A "log" would make it somewhat easier to answer questions and repair data, but probably not be a panacea. I think it would likely also introduce problems of its own. [I don't know of any such log currently being created.]