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How to find data error.

Somehow I've made a data error I can't find.

However, I make a backup every month after reconciling my checking account (the account in question). I keep the past 12 monthly backups on a rolling basis. Thus I know I have the data thats needed, in order to find this error. It started with February being balanced. Then march came up with a different opening balance than February's closing balance. $62.40 is the amount. I've got a financial/bookkeeping background, so I tried all the usual tricks to find it, but can't. This hasn't happend to me in about 18 or so. I'm procrastinating the setting aside of time thats needed (a whole day) to run it down myself. Shorter time frames planning as resulted in depressive thoughts of what I know I"m up against or the phone rings. You know the drill.

Is there a way, product or idea on how to compare the same account in from two different data files (current and backup) to find a missing (or extra) transaction. Yes, I've thought about exporting to excel (and even access) and running some king of report or excel tool, but I was hoping to avoid that drugery if possible sense I consider myself a sporadic mid-skill level user of excel.

On the other hand, if you are so kind as to walk me through excel on how to compare to imported quicken files I'd be greatful.

On the other hand, has someone out there invented a product especially for this problem speciffically for Quicken.

I'm using 2005 Home & Business.

Scott

Reply to
treasur2
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I've never done this and it may be a little complicated, but here's a thought:

1) Obviously you know the account the error is in, so that limits the area you need to search.

2) Export the account data from Feb and March as two separate comma-delimited files. Q2005 Basic only allows you to save them as qif files, I don't know what other versions allow. But qif is fine for what you're about to try. Call them whatever you want when you save them, but let's say you call them "Feb.qif" and "March.qif".

3) Open the folder where you saved the files. Rename those files as "Feb.doc" and "March.doc". They have now become word processing documents. There may be some garbage characters in there but the transactions should all be readable when you open them.

4) Now, assuming you have Microsoft Word, there is a function that lets you compare two different documents and highlights what's different. I can't tell you exactly how to do that, because I'm using a beta version of Office that won't be on the market for a while. Its controls are different from earlier versions of Word. But if you can figure out how to do that in Word, it should show you the transactions that are NOT in both the Feb and March files.

I can't promise you that'll work, but it's the one thing that comes to mind.

Reply to
DP

Correction: I did not mean to say "comma-delimited files." I meant to delete that part. So, part 2 should read:

Reply to
DP

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to investigate a reconciled account whose starting balance didn't match the ending balance from the last reconciliation.

I started off by looking for a single transaction valued at the difference between the ending balance of the previous reconciliation (from the bank statement) and the starting balance Quicken wanted.

This didn't work so I made a transaction report for all dates for the account in question but only reconciled transactions. I repeated this with an older backup. I imported the reports into Excel and used spreadsheet formulas to produce a balance for each transaction. I then compared the two spreadsheets looking for when the balances stopped matching. This quickly highlight two transactions that had somehow become reconciled in Quicken but not on my bank statement.

Maybe this approach will help you.

Mike

Reply to
mikebk824

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