Reconcile, start balance is wrong.

Thanks, that's the usual problem but I'm $17,414.86 too high which eliminates a single transaction.

I don't do that but that HAS to be what happened, I've found literally hundreds of duplicate transactions, my only fix has been to delete Quicken, delete all related files, registry entries, etc. and then re- install. I found I could balance if I restored my February backup but not if I restored a later one.

I'm now manually entering all the transactions from February 28 forward and it's pretty slow....

Reply to
XS11E
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Those were non-working answers, I had to remove all reconciled transactions from Quicken, the easiest way was to delete it and all related files, registry entries, etc. and then re-install and restore backups.

Strangely enough, only the February backup allowed me to reconcile, any later gave me similar errors despite the fact that April balanced?????

So now I'm manually entering the entries from February forward, very tedious...

I'll probably never know WHY it downloaded and accepted hundreds of duplicate transactions going back to November of last year (the dupes do NOT show up in the February or earlier backups) and reconciled all of them even though it balanced at the end of April. I have to believe that April would be OK to restore but I'm unable to find that backup and that's another mystery I may never solve....

Reply to
XS11E

Non-working answers, my eye.

You clearly still don't understand anything about how Quicken reconcile works. When you receive an answer and can't accept it (or refuse to ask for clarification) ... the problem has become your personal problem.

You have exacerbated (if not created) your own problem.

I have, on occasion, had to re-reconcile, using the same logic I provided you ... and done so with no difficulty.

I will no longer attempt to help you.

Please don't waste any one else's time here with your false claim.

Reply to
John Pollard

Hundreds of duplicates sounds like whatever file keeps track of what has been downloaded from the bank either became corrupt or deleted. Your bank then downloaded all transactions back to the beginning of their download window. With you manually entering the transactions might cause those transactions to be downloaded again the next time you do a OSU. I suggest you make a backup prior to your next update just to be safe. Hopefully I am wrong...good luck.

Reply to
Laura

The problem is that the start date of a reconciliation doesn't have the slightest effect on the opening balance as Quicken calculates the opening balance by summing the values of all the reconciled transactions.

Yes, it's not logical to have a reconciliation start date that's ignored during reconciliation. Unfortunately this isn't the only place where irrelevant informnation is collected while starting a reconciliation. (For instance, when you start a credit card reconciliation, you are asked for the total amount of charges and the total amount of credits during the period. These two values don't seem to affect reconciliation at all - For years, I've been using 0 for both when reconciling credit card accounts!)

Anyway, I have a process that I use when I run across a reconciliation opening balance problem. I run Quicken using one of my backup files that doesn't show the problem. I export a register report and open it in Excel. I close the old file in Quicken and open the current one. I export a register report for the new one and open it in Excel. In both spreadsheets, I add a running total "Balance" column where each line is the sum of the previous balance plus the value of the current transaction.

At this point, I can readily see which transaction are in one file but not in the other by scrolling up and down and looking to see where the balances differ. Excel has a side by side comparison function that may be helpful. There are also comparison tools that are sometimes helpful.

Hope this helps

Mike

Reply to
Mike Blake-Knox

Thanks for the ideas, you're absolutely right, the problem is that Quicken can't match existing transactions to newly downloaded transactions, I had a thread about that some time back (manual matching isn't available either, don't know why?) and a fix was never found. A lot of good information was provided but none of it seemed to apply to my particular problem.

This all started when I changed financial institutions so it's something on their end. There is other fluky behavior as well, all dating to changing my checking/credit card accounts from UBS to RBC.

Good idea but a backup doesn't help if I fail to catch it when it happens and somehow that's exactly what did happen, I failed to catch it somehow???

I have a fix, I'm reluctant to do it because it's a hassle but I may have to... I'm sure if I switch the credit card/checking services from the RBC account to Merrill Lynch account, everything will work properly again, it's somehow related to how RBC handles Quicken downloads. If I get another similar problem that's what I'll have to do.

Reply to
XS11E

Non-working.

I do but you clearly don't understand the problem. I admit that's my fault since I don't understand it either it's difficult to explain properly but, try this: The problem I'm having is that the bank (RBC in this case) downloaded hundreds of duplicate transactions dating back into last year. Since these have all been reconciled (no, I don't know how they got accepted into the register or how they became reconciled w/o balancing) the only fix is to delete all of the duplicates that are marked reconciled and the easy way to do that is to start over as I've done.

You've been no help at all so far and this last childish outburst from you doesn't help any either.

Reply to
XS11E

Thanks but I think the problem is I'm asking an incomplete question, I needed to change the start date AND remove all the "reconciled" tags from the hundreds of duplicate transactions that go back into last year. See my reply to Laura.

I've just started over, that seems to be the easiest in light of the number of duplicates.

Reply to
XS11E

If you try to reenter transactions you will make errors.

  1. Display register by date.
  2. Go back to last correct reconciliation.
  3. Duplicate entries should be easy to spot by scanning $$.
  4. Delete the duplicates.
  5. Repeat the ending reconciliation.
Reply to
Zaidy036

Can you elaborate on the timing and mechanics please? When did you switch from UBS to RBC and what did you do in Quicken to reflect the switch? Was the April statement from UBS and the May one from RBC?

The way Quicken prevents duplicate entries is that the bank assigns a unique ID to each transaction. When a new transaction is downloaded, Quicken ignores if if the transaction ID has already been processed. If UBS had a way to transfer old transactions to RBC, I would tend to assume that RBC would use different transaction IDs.

It sounds like you are downloading old UBS transactions from RBC! How would RBC have any record of them? Understanding this may shed a lot of light on what's going on. Generally when one gets a new credit card account, you create a new account for the new bank and have a transfer transaction move the balance from the old account to the new account. If you had and even if RBC was able to download your UBS transactions, you could easily delete the old transactions.

In fact, that would be the easiest way to delete all the old transactions: Create a new Quicken account, activate it to RBC and download your transactions. You can then shift-click to select all the transactions and delete them. Afterwards, you could move all your transactions from the old account to the new one but you will likely run across reconciliation problems as Quicken has problems moving transfer transactions.

Incidentally, I download from RBC Bank (US) myself using web connect. The web site has a pop-up that controls which transactions are downloaded. Mine is set to download only new transactions. How is yours set?

Hope this helps.

Mike

Reply to
Mike Blake-Knox

There are hundreds.

Reply to
XS11E

About a year ago, all I did in Q was to add the RBC accounts and, as everything wa transferred, eventually deleted the UBS accounts.

No, both were RBC as were the previous 5 - 6 months.

No, all the duplicates are from after the change.

Because they're all previous RBC transactions.

Can't go back more than 3 months, I thought of that, of course.

Same.

Reply to
XS11E

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