Hi, I'm kind of in the middle of a reconcile problem that I'm not sure how to handle. I wrote a payment on line to, let's say, Company X, for $30. It hasn't cleared yet. Meanwhile, a bankcard transaction came through for the same amount, $30. Quicken (Windows, 2005) wanted to use that bankcard transaction to reconcile the outstanding check I sent to Company X. I let Quicken do that, not knowing what else to do. I then tried to change the name (Company X) in the register to the place that I used the bankcard but Quicken wouldn't let me. So, now I reconcile ok but the name is incorrect. I can live with that if I have to. But what will happen when that check finally does clear ? It won't have anything un-reconciled to match to. It will see that the item with that same check # has already been reconciled. And, why did Quicken use that bankcard transaction to reconcile the check to Company X in the first place ? Just because it was the same amount, and the check hadn't cleared yet ? Am I doing something wrong, or is this just a bug with Quicken ? And finally, why is it so impossible to get any info out of Intuit ? I refuse to pay $24.95 for help from them. That's almost as much as I paid for their buggy software. Anyway, any advice would be much appreciated. Thanks, Brian.
Reconcile Problem (Bug ?)
Apr 08, 2005
2 Replies
I find this sentence confusing. Quicken doesn't "reconcile" one transaction to another ... it does sometimes offer to "match" a downloaded transaction to transaction already in the Quicken register. Is that what you are referring to?
If, you are not obliged to accept that the downloaded transaction is, in fact, a "match" to the existing transaction. Quicken is making, what might be called, an educated guess; sometimes Quicken is wrong. When Quicken is wrong, you change the "Status" of the downloaded transaction from "match" to "new" and accept the "new" transaction.
The "what else to do" is to change the "Status" of the downloaded transaction from "match" to "new". I don't have a matched transaction handy to verify this, but I believe that you click the "Edit" to the right of the downloaded transaction (or right-click the downloaded transaction) and use the resulting menu to choose "Make Transaction New". Then accept the transaction.
If my guess above is correct, then you are doing something wrong. And in order to recover from it, you must, at the least, manually enter the downloaded transaction that you allowed to be matched to an existing register transaction. Then change the wrongly matched transaction to have the correct payee name.
You probably also want to modify the wrongly matched transaction to clear its "Downloaded Transaction" flag (uncheck it) and clear the "Posting Date" field to spaces (because that transaction has not been *correctly* "match"ed). Both of those fields can be accessed by right-clicking the transaction in the register, the holding down the CTRL key while left-clicking "Copy Transaction". That should leave the transaction available to "match" to the correct downloaded transaction that you anticipate seeing.
Because it is very expensive to provide human beings to talk to Quicken users.
Thanks John. Sometimes I'm afraid to mess with transactions thinking I'll really mess things up even more. But I did what you said, and now I'll be ready for when the actual check does come through. I owe you $24.95 :-) Brian.
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