Account Balancing Offset

[Jeff Feit]

I've run into an odd problem and I'm hoping someone else has experienced it and can help troubleshoot it.

I have an account that I update via OFX downloads from my bank. This keeps it up to date so I rarely actually "balance" it through Money. Occasionally something gets off from a mistake, and I'll go ahead and balance several months of statements in order to get everything straight again. Or sometimes for no particular reason, just to keep it updated.

I've run into a situation where it insists that my initial balance is off by $2000, but that doesn't match with what is in the register. So far I've been ignoring it. My other option is to allow it to make a $2000 adjustment to my initial balance, which is zero because I've been tracking this account since it was opened.

For example, the account is currently balanced through 1/12/2026. My bank statement says the ending balance was $16,908.78. If I go to 1/12/2026 in Money, it shows the balance as $16,908.78 after adjusting it for one transaction that was dated the 10th but hadn't cleared by the 12th. But if I hit the "Balance this account" it comes up with a starting balance of $14,908.78. This comes from the $16,908.78 ending balance I had used when I balanced it in January, which Money adjusts for the $2000 it thinks I am off.

I could see this happening if I had mistakenly added or deleted a reconciled transaction--but if I did that, the balance shown on the date of the statement would also be off, so I'm confused as to what could have caused this.

Any ideas?

[Cal Learner]

I don't use the built-in balancing method, but I have a note on the topic:

The balancing paradigm is that you receive a statement that covers
a period of time, or at least it covers a set of transactions not
covered by other statements.  The transactions covered by previous
statements should have been marked as balanced before starting.
The net sum of the reconciled transactions should match the
starting balance.

You may have already marked transactions that have been recognized
by the statement issuer during the period of the statement as
cleared.  Those transactions covered by the statement that have not
been marked as cleared should be will be marked as such during the
balancing process.

Electronically cleared transactions are marked with E during
downloads or imports.  For Money, this has no distinction from a
blank C column for purposes of the balancing process.

An E item that is marked as Reconciled or Cleared and later marked
as unreconciled will return to its E status.

For Money, E (Electronically cleared) is not considered Cleared by
the Balancing process.  During the balancing, you must still
left-click the Es to change them to Cs.  As you do, the Difference
moves toward $0.00.  For M02, Es in the statement period are
automatically changed to Cs.

There appears to be no built-in effect of the C column for
investment accounts.  There is no balancing.  The column can serve
as a memo for whether downloaded etc.

If you wish to start fresh and declare an account balanced, you can
mark all entries balanced.  Select to show only unreconciled
transactions.  Sort by date, and go to the oldest transaction.
Hold down Cntl+Shift+M and let auto-repeat work thru the
transactions until none are left showing.  Do not change the
starting date or starting balance.  The starting balance is the sum
of the transactions that have already been marked as reconciled.
Then balance making the ending balance match the known balance.
Choose the balance date to be the day after your last transaction.
This is not the normal procedure.  It starts you with an amnesty
for former balancing.

Thereafter, follow the normal procedure.  Look at the balancing
movie clip from your Money disk.

During the normal procedure, you are presented with the list of
transactions that are not reconciled.  In the left column will be
the starting, and ending balances you entered as you started
balancing.  There will also be a difference amount.  As you click
on the C column for a transaction reflected on the statement, that
space in the C column will change to a C.  If you mark an
transaction cleared that has not actually been reflected on the
statement, you can click the C column again to toggle the cleared
status.  The difference should move toward zero.  As you continue,
you should eventually get the difference to zero.  If you can not,
you can click next.  Money will offer some choices.

===================Bonnie Synhorst said=======================
|Balancing can be frustrating.  ..  My rule of thumb is to avoid
|changing the starting statement balance that it asks for.  If you
|do this, it will try to make an adjustment that you may not have
|needed to make (if you were balancing months out of order, for
|instance).  I recommend balancing month by month starting from the
|earliest date after you are sure that nothing is marked with an R.
|
|Just remember, the opening balance it asks for is a calculation of
|the opening account balance plus or minus any reconciled
|transactions.

[Harry Walden]

It wouldn’t throw the balance off if a previously reconciled transaction (or transactions equalling) $2000 was accidentally marked as other than reconciled. Have you filtered the ledger for unreconciled transactions to see if something like that has happened?

[Jeff Feit]

To throw it off, I would have had to delete an already reconciled transaction, or add a transaction and mark it as reconciled. But if I did that, it would throw off the actual balance in my account. But the balance in my account is right and it matches the bank. It's just that when I go to balance it, it disagrees with the starting balance.

[Cal Learner]

Jeff: If you want to just have everything marked balanced, read the paragraph I wrote that contains "amnesty". 

If you are looking to understand what had happened to get you into this situation, keep studying.

[Harry Walden]

While those are two ways to mess up a previous reconciliation, they are not the only ways. As I said, you could also accidentally mark a reconciled transaction as something other than reconciled and that would also throw off the starting balance but without affecting the actual balance amount. I've been doing this for thirty years, and have done that in the past. Maybe you should consider what you might have fiddled with since your last reconciliation activity. To narrow down the time period, you could open whatever series of backups you have to see if the balance is still OK in some of those.

[Jim Reynolds]

In the past, the occasional version of these kind of problems has been that a future entry is reconciled ("R") when it shouldn't be.  This has often been casued by recurring bills and deposits which were created from an existing and already reconciled example.  If this is so, just change the R to unreconciled.  You will also need to remove and recreate the recurring entry for the next time it is invoked.

[Ameridan (microsoftmoneyoffline.wordpress.com)]

Harry said "  you could also accidentally mark a reconciled transaction as something other than reconciled and that would also throw off the starting balance but without affecting the actual balance amount."

undoing a VOIDed transaction is a good example of this.  They are automatically reconciled, but that is undone if you remove the VOID.

[J Hoban]

The starting balance in Money reconcile is the sum of all reconciled transactions.  For your starting balance to be off from your bank, a transaction was marked as reconciled when it shouldn't have been, or vice versa.   I'd be looking at your January bank statement against your reconciled transactions to see if there isn't something mismarked.  

Then again, you could just go through a reconcile and see if the problem solves itself.  

My way of operating is to sort of doing a reconcile each time I read an ofx file.  Unless I had manually entered transactions, the "Bank Balance" in the upper right above the headers should match the Money account balance.   If I have manually entered transactions I temporarily play with dates of the non-E transactions to get a line that compares.  Its easier to fix balance errors early.

[Jeff Feit]

The problem was that the starting balance WAS NOT the sum of all reconciled transactions. In my example below, the sum of all reconciled transactions was $16,908.78. When I went to balance it, Money showed the starting balance as $14,908.78. I've been using Money for 28 years (and this account dates back to 2006) so I'm pretty familiar with how it is supposed to work, and it was not working correctly.

Whatever the issue was, it resolved itself. After going through and balancing it for the rest of the statements I had-- each time it telling me I was off by $2000, and each time ignoring it and not allowing it to adjust my starting balance-- it now matches. If I hit "Balance this account" it shows the correct sum of all reconciled transactions.

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[J Hoban]

Sorry Jeff, I wasn't very clear.  

My going in assumption from years of messing up my own account balances is that Money is correct, the starting balance is the sum of all reconciled transactions.   For you to see a transaction marked R having a balance that matched your bank statement and then have the balancing tool show a starting balance $2,000 less, there must be something like an earlier unreconciled deposit that you are not seeing, or a later reconciled withdrawal.  You might not see the transaction because you have filtered it out, date filter or reconcile filter.  Once you get into the balancing tool it shows you all the unreconciled transactions for all dates.  If there was an earlier unreconciled deposit, it would have shown at the top of in your list, hard to miss.  So, that leaves a mistakenly reconciled future withdrawal.  If you filter out reconciled transactions, you would never it.  Eventually, you reconciled the statement that contained that transaction and then everything balances out.   That sounds kind of odd also, how could a future transaction get marked as reconciled, but it fits the description.