how to (re)reconcile an account

Here is where you lost it.

If you are interested in "reconciling" your account: you should NEVER accept an adjustment.

This is just a matter of too much knowledge not being of any useful value.

If you can't reconcile your Quicken data without resorting to knowledge about qif files; you should stop worrying about reconciling altogether.

If you just want to go through the motions; by all means, continue to accept adjustments to your Quicken account.

So this is another way of saying that you don't know?

Anyone else care to address the question?

Thanks.

Did your initial "check book" balance on 1/1/2007 agree with the bank statement INCLUDING any uncleared checks or deposits?

If these existed you would have to enter them into Q with dates before

- - I would then:

1. Remove ALL adjustment entries in the Q file made by Q AND you.
2. Reconcile the complete file to your most recent checking statement balance. - You must change ALL "R"s back to "C"s or " " by comparing with all past bank statements.
3. I would then use Q search to try to identify the remaining balance errors, if any.
4. Once you are satisfied (I want exact figures to the .01 in my accounts) if you decide to enter an adjustment in Q then do it
5. Never enter another adjustment because bank statement-to-statement Q should not have errors.

Have fun ... I hope you did not have too much activity in the account.

Eric

John: If all you want is to have your balances match, I would just enter a transaction called Adjustment, and put in the amount you need to zero out the difference. But, it seems to me that if you put so much effort into creating this account, you would want it to reflect historical reality, which entails going back to the beginning and figuring out why you don't balance. Bob

Problem solved. Phew! Here is how I did it.

Short answer: Just delete all the previous reconciliation statements. It's just that this wasn't obvious to me, and "R"s couldn't be cleared in transactions. Clicking on an R caused all kinds of confusing reconciliation bells and whistles to go off.

After many futile efforts at re-reconciling the checking account after putting in a previous year's transactions by importing from a qif file, I was at a window where the list of reconciliation statements were displayed. I could select each one, and had a couple of choices like reconcile again that didn't succeed. No delete or anything to fix the problem. However, on a whim, I went to the top of the main window at that point, and under Edit, there was a delete reconciliation statement (or something like that), and lo and behold, clicking on it made that whole dated reconciliation go away forever, and the relevant R's were removed from the transactions in the register. So I did this for all 6 or so reconciliations, and that part of the file was clean again.

At that point I could have reconciled again, but I noticed that the earlier year's transactions were also flagged with an R, but weren't in the list of reconciliation statements because they were imported that way. I then realized that the CX in the qif template that I used to import that year's transactions was flagging them with an R (oops, my bad). And the above method of getting rid of the R's wouldn't work because the reonciliation wasn't done by Quicken and thus in a line to delete, as above.

So I deleted all the imported entries. (oh yes, I was making new disk backups of the file at every step now so I could always go back to the previous version if things went south). I edited out all 192 CX lines in the qif file, and imported them again, now they weren't marked as Reconciled. So far so good.

Now I had a complete file of checking transactions from 1/1/2007 to the present. And none of them marked as Reconciled. And at the previous step, I manually removed, one by one, the Cleared status that was on the 11/2007-present remaining entries. I don't know if that would cause a new reconciliation to fail or not, but it couldn't hurt (other than the time to do it).

So now the full file was "clean" of all Reconciliation or Cleared flags. And I was done putting in or editing any of its old entries, so now I did a fresh reconcile (I had to clear every transaction one at a time; there is an uncheck all, but no check all feature) and a one time (insignificant) adjust and all is well now for reconciling to 0.0 every time I download new transactions to it.

Phew!

See another message from me here imminently about helpful features that would have made this easier for me, and some other observations I've made about the Mac Quicken 2007 version (at least).

The reconciling was wounded, and I couldn't get it to adjust, at least in what I considered a clean manner. I posted how I resolved it eventually.

Thanks!

Yes, I entered a deposit on 12/31/2006 as a starting account value.

This was what couldn't figure out how to do. I finally figured it out and posted what I did.

Indeed. Only this one modest adjustment. Not bad for not balancing my checkbook for about 25 years!

Only about 2000 transactions for the two years. :-( But it is now done! :-)

Thanks!