Hours spent running down a Qucken error I've never seen before

[TomYoung]

Hi all:

I run a fairly complicated monthly and year-to-date budget report that
pulls information from only *some* of the accounts in my Quicken file
and that excludes unrealized investment gain. I also prepare an
accompanying balance sheet that limits itself to the same accounts as
the budget report and also excludes unrealized gain. I always check
to see that the budget report's "bottom line" is correct by comparing
it to the change in equity as calculated off the beginning and ending
balance sheets since it's easy to forget to add a new account or
category to one or the other reports.

This month my "proof" was off by a considerable amount and in working
through why this was so I found that I'd neglected to update the
reports properly for a couple of new accounts. However, even after
fixing this I was still of by quite a bit.

After lots of report running, head scratching and so on I found two
transactions that added up to the number remaining to be reconciled.
The two transactions were deposits of independent contractor income
into one of my Schwab brokerage accounts. One deposit was a split
transaction and one was not. The deposits properly showed up in the
register as increasing the account's cash. Subsequent transfers of
the checks' amounts to other accounts showed up properly as reductions
in cash in the brokerage account and increases in cash in checking and
savings accounts. The deposits were showing up in the budget report
as income. What the heck could be wrong?

It finally dawned on me that the summary cost basis figure showing up
for the Schwab brokerage account in the balance sheet was *excluding*
the deposits in its calculations! I could prove this was so by
running a Portfolio Value report for this account (this report give
the cost basis for each security and cash in the account) for any date
after the deposit and comparing the total to the summary number
reported by a Net Worth report with the same date. At any date before
the deposits the two reports had the same totals and at any date after
the deposits the report totals differed by the amount of the deposits.

Validation of the file did nothing to fix this.

You'd think that deleting and re-entering the deposits would correct
the error, but obviously the problem was somehow buried in the
Memorized Payee information as deletion and re-entering resulted in
the problem re-appearing. It was only after deleting the memorized
information and then re-entering the deposits as non-split
transactions was the situation finally resolved.

Very weird.

Tom Young

[farr...@gmail.com]

Very interesting resolution, seemingly somehow tied to the Memorized Payee. I have just had a weird thing happen and have yet to figure out how to fix it.

I bought a stock and entered it into the brokerage account which is linked to a cash account. The cost of the stock appeared in the cash account correctly and the stock was correctly listed in the stock portfolio. The cost basis of the portfolio was correctly updated to include the purchase. The problem arose when I ran a balance sheet and found that the amount of the purchase was not included in the asset column. However two other purchases made the same week were included. This put my balance out by the amount of the purchase. I deleted the transaction and re-entered with the error continuing to appear. I run a duplicate copy of Quicken on another computer and the same error occurred there. I am running Quicken 2013 which is being phased out and wonder if that could be the problem. I do not use the download abilities of Quicken, preferring to enter all data myself. Keeps me focused on my investments. Any ideas on how to fix it or what could be causing it? Can't find anything online.

Thanks,
Jerry