How to see old statements

This has helped me when something in my Quicken file has gotten deleted:

Sort your quicken file by date and compare the ending balance on each bank statement until you find the one that is incorrect. Then narrow your search by day until you find the date that is missing a transaction.

I don't see how to even do that. When each statement closed, there were always some transactions before that date that did not clear before the statement closed...So the statements will almost never match the running total anywhere.

At some time previously I had a transaction that was messed up...Quicken showed me the statement it was reconciled on. How do I go there manually? I was under the impression that it recorded all reconciliations.

Good point. I only download the transactions into Quicken so my bank statements will always match Quicken. This is not the case if you are entering transactions into your register as you incur them.

Quicken does not save the account recs so you have nothing to go back on unless you print them out at the end of each month. At this point you may be stuck going back through all of the bank statements until you find the transaction that got deleted.

Quicken does keep some record of each previous statement, though I'm not sure it is a detailed record, but it can be anywhere from difficult to impossible to see them.

The only historical record of reconciliations that I have ever seen is that which appears if you elect to "Resolve" an out of balance reconcile condition ... it's part of the feature Quicken calls "Smart Reconcile". If you are going to get the option to "Resolve", it only happens when you initiate a reconcile. At that time, if Quicken detects a reconcile problem, *and* Smart Reconcile is operational, you will get a dialog box, with a message stating there is a problem, and a button labelled "Resolve". If you don't get that, you have to take some other approach. It used to be that you could force Quicken to display the Resolve button by manually unreconciling a transaction ... I'm not sure that works anymore.

I don't recall that the Resolve dialog allowed you to see a full previous reconcile, all I remember seeing was a list of previous reconcile statements, their dates, and balances, with an indication of which ones were in error. I don't remember all the details, but I think you needed to delete all reconcile statements from the most current back to the oldest incorrect reconcile ... then re-reconcile those transactions.

If that's not possible, the only alternative I know is to unreconcile all the transactions, starting from the most current, until there is no problem, then re-reconcile (you do not have to reconcile each previous statement, you can reconcile all transactions in one statement).

When it worked, Smart Reconcile could be turned off by manually reconciling a transaction, and turned back on by manually unreconciling that same transaction. If you manually reconciled a transaction but don't remember which one it was, I have no idea what you do.

And at some point (Q2005?), I was unable to ever get Smart Reconcile to function, even in a new Quicken file.

This won't help right now, but I *DO* like my running totals to match up with my statements.

What *I* do, is to put the date of transactions that don't appear on the previous month's statement into the memo field.

Then I modify the date of the transaction to after the statement closing date.

Of course, this creates other problems, especially for year-end reports, but so far I've not had any major problems.

Bob

I don't see how to even do that. When each statement closed, there were always some transactions before that date that did not clear before the statement closed...So the statements will almost never match the running total anywhere.

At some time previously I had a transaction that was messed up...Quicken showed me the statement it was reconciled on. How do I go there manually? I was under the impression that it recorded all reconciliations.

Hmmmm, if only one transaction was deleted then determine the difference in the banks balance and Quicken balance then go back and look at previous bank statements looking for the same amount. Of course if more then one entry was deleted then this won't work. But this should be a quick way to manually have look for the error.

Here's a use for those backups you've been faithfully making. Take a backup from before you started having problems and copy it to a working location. Start Quicken then open the qdf file in the working location. Get a transaction report (sorted by date) for the problematic account and print it to a file.

Close the backup file then open your normal qdf file. Make a transaction report for the the same account and save it to another file. At this point you have two transaction reports you can compare. You can do this by eye or by using a program. MS Word is a program many people already have which can compare files (Compare and Merge Documents in the Tools menu). What your're looking for is a transaction that shows up only in one or whose "Cleared" column is different.

Hope this helps.

Mike

Not sure what you mean. Compare previous statements to...what? As was discussed in another part of this thread, the running total never matches the statement due to transactions that have been entered but not yet cleared.