Irma, Dick, Elizabeth, et al - Hi and Good Peach, Happy Easter and a good
weekend if nothing else fits!
Re reconciling problems with Credit Card Accounts:
First of all, reconciling to the on line balance has never enchanted me.
That balance represents only cleared transactions and rarely corresponds
to your Statement Balance. Probably the reason Irma's transactions
described below hadn't downloaded, was because at the time she first
downloaded, they had not cleared yet. In addition, yes, sometimes
everything that appears on a statement doesn't download from the FI!
In either Bank accounts or credit card accounts, when you download and
then accept a transaction into your register, it is marked "cleared",
because the only way it can be downloaded is because it came into the
account at the FI as a credit or debit...that is the meaning of
"cleared". If you entered a transaction manually into the register, it
would not be cleared until the bank sees it. This would appear in
Quicken when it downloaded and you matched the downloaded transaction to
the one you'd entered manually.
A transaction does not appear as Reconciled until you use the Reconcile
feature and actually let it balance to either the statement or credit
care statement closing balance. If you've opted to use the on-line
reconcile, it will become an "R" when the balance of selected
transactions matches the on-line balance. Maybe using "always reconcile
to on-line balance does that automatically without going through the
Reconcile feature screens. I don't know, because I've never used on-line
balances.
Since I pay all my credit card balances in full each month, frankly, I
never bother using Reconcile for my Credit Card accounts. As long as I
show a zero balance after itemizing the charges from a given statement
vs. the payment for that statement, I know all is correct. If it's not
zero, I go looking for duplicates or errors. If you have fees and
partial payments, you might need to use reconcile. However, I prefer
reconciling to my statement and not to the on-line balance.
If you can't find any duplicates or mistakes, just let Quicken make an
adjustment to reconcile, if you want to go on using reconcile.
It used to be that they said once you'd started with on-line Reconcile
you could not change back to reconcile to statement. However, new
entries in the support forums for recent Quicken versions indicate you
can do so.
Babette
On Fri, 3 Apr 2015 15:48:05 -0700 "Irma " <irmbo@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
Hi Babette,
(I realize the timing of this request for help is not good, being that
this is a holiday weekend.)
Im having an awful time reconciling my visa account in Quicken 2014.
Usually when I finish downloading there are no outstanding charges.
However, now nothing balances. I found a few transactions that hadnt
downloaded, so I went back to the bank list of transactions and
downloaded the missing items. They are now successfully downloaded but
are designated as cleared, as opposed to reconciled (from Januarythis
problem has been building since then). With each one the difference
between the cleared balance and the statement balance got larger. The
difference is now $1000.
A couple of transactions were duplicates. This surprised me, because
generally a transaction only downloads once. I deleted the duplicates.
When I open the Reconcile Online Account tab it doesnt allow me to put
in the March ending balanceinstead it has a fixed amount that is
supposedly my current ending balance.
Should I reconcile it with the online balance?
Thanks,
Irma
