how to (re)reconcile an account

Posted by Bob Wang on November 15, 2008, 5:37 pm

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John:
If all you want is to have your balances match, I would just enter a
transaction called Adjustment, and put in the amount you need to zero out
the difference.
But, it seems to me that if you put so much effort into creating this
account, you would want it to reflect historical reality, which entails
going back to the beginning and figuring out why you don't balance.
Bob

Posted by John on November 15, 2008, 8:52 pm

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Bob Wang wrote:

> John:

> If all you want is to have your balances match, I would just enter a

> transaction called Adjustment, and put in the amount you need to zero out

> the difference.

> But, it seems to me that if you put so much effort into creating this

> account, you would want it to reflect historical reality, which entails

> going back to the beginning and figuring out why you don't balance.

> Bob

The reconciling was wounded, and I couldn't get it to adjust, at least
in what I considered a clean manner. I posted how I resolved it
eventually.

Thanks!

Posted by John on November 15, 2008, 8:00 pm

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Problem solved. Phew! Here is how I did it.

Short answer: Just delete all the previous reconciliation
statements. It's just that this wasn't obvious to me, and
"R"s couldn't be cleared in transactions. Clicking on an
R caused all kinds of confusing reconciliation bells and
whistles to go off.

After many futile efforts at re-reconciling the checking account
after putting in a previous year's transactions by importing
from a qif file, I was at a window where the list of reconciliation
statements were displayed. I could select each one, and had a
couple of choices like reconcile again that didn't succeed. No
delete or anything to fix the problem. However, on a whim, I went
to the top of the main window at that point, and under Edit,
there was a delete reconciliation statement (or something like
that), and lo and behold, clicking on it made that whole dated
reconciliation go away forever, and the relevant R's were removed
from the transactions in the register. So I did this for all 6 or
so reconciliations, and that part of the file was clean again.

At that point I could have reconciled again, but I noticed that
the earlier year's transactions were also flagged with an R,
but weren't in the list of reconciliation statements because
they were imported that way. I then realized that the CX in the
qif template that I used to import that year's transactions was
flagging them with an R (oops, my bad). And the above method of
getting rid of the R's wouldn't work because the reonciliation
wasn't done by Quicken and thus in a line to delete, as above.

So I deleted all the imported entries. (oh yes, I was making
new disk backups of the file at every step now so I could always
go back to the previous version if things went south). I
edited out all 192 CX lines in the qif file, and imported
them again, now they weren't marked as Reconciled. So far so good.

Now I had a complete file of checking transactions from 1/1/2007
to the present. And none of them marked as Reconciled. And at
the previous step, I manually removed, one by one, the Cleared
status that was on the 11/2007-present remaining entries. I
don't know if that would cause a new reconciliation to fail
or not, but it couldn't hurt (other than the time to do it).

So now the full file was "clean" of all Reconciliation or
Cleared flags. And I was done putting in or editing any of
its old entries, so now I did a fresh reconcile (I had to clear
every transaction one at a time; there is an uncheck all, but
no check all feature) and a one time (insignificant) adjust and
all is well now for reconciling to 0.0 every time I download
new transactions to it.

Phew!

See another message from me here imminently about helpful features
that would have made this easier for me, and some other observations
I've made about the Mac Quicken 2007 version (at least).