Consumerism Commentary - Latest Comments in Reader Question: Ignoring Reconciliation in Quicken

Re: Reader Question: Ignoring Reconciliation in Quicken

LD — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 19:35:57 -0000

I prefer paper statement reconciliation but decided to try online. It looked wrong and I cancelled it, didn't complete the reconciliation. But now, quicken won't let me go back to statement reconciliation, the beginning and ending balance are not correct and can't be changed. What can I do? the online reconciliation is jacked up and doesn't show the correct info!

Help!

Re: Reader Question: Ignoring Reconciliation in Quicken

mapgirl — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 09:12:08 -0000

Vishal,

Reconciling 'never being the same' refers to switching back and forth between online and paper statements. It is actually possible to have it be the same, if you practice some earnestness and delete your duplicated transactions. There are days when even online reconciliation is off for me because I forgot this-and-that-transaction-of-87-cents. Have no fear, it will work if you pay attention to what you are doing.

Re: Reader Question: Ignoring Reconciliation in Quicken

Vishal — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 13:54:48 -0000

I'm a student trying to use this to figure out my expenses. Now you mentioned that when you download your account information, the balances will never be the same. My question is, would it eventually "catch-up" and be the same after you download multiple times? Is there a way to have the same balances?

Re: Reader Question: Ignoring Reconciliation in Quicken

Anonymous — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 07:00:47 -0000

I'm actually scared of quicken now, and I've switched to KMyMoney. It's a lot simpler, and it doesn't force me to upgrade when I don't want to. I don't think that business users will find it very useful, but for my home use it's great.

Re: Reader Question: Ignoring Reconciliation in Quicken

Valerie — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 12:51:30 -0000

There are two ways to reconcile in Quicken...either reconciling to your hard copy statement, or to the balance reported when you down load.

THE DOWNLOAD BALANCE WILL NEVER THE SAME AS THE BALANCE SHOWN ON YOUR STATEMENT. This is due to the fact that the download balance is as of the day of the download, and is not the same as the closing date of your statement.

Also, bear in mind that you can't go back and forth between statement reconciliations and download reconciliations. Once you've reconciled to the download balance, you can't go back to statement reconciliations. So choose one method and stick to it.

Re: Reader Question: Ignoring Reconciliation in Quicken

tinyhands — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 17:01:02 -0000

Question back to the reader: Why don't the balances match?

If you know, then you can put in an adjusting entry to reconcile them. If you don't know, find out.

Re: Reader Question: Ignoring Reconciliation in Quicken

mapgirl — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 09:03:21 -0000

Reconciliation shouldn't be too hard, but auto matching transactions doesn't work that well, neither does manual matching. Sometimes I just have delete the downloaded transaction and go straight to the recon screen. Typical example is that I get three checks, I like to make one entry for each check vs a split transaction, but the bank gives me one total deposit item. The account will still balance.

If your accounts AREN'T balancing, it's a problem and you should track that down. Perhaps it's fraud. Perhaps you bought something you don't remember, or your joint account holder is trying to hide something from you.