Main > Feedback [Account balancing is painful, am I missing something?]
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support
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Re:Account balancing is painful, am I missing something?
Thank you for bringing this to our attention. We've received some feedback in the past due to some confusion over the balance account option so we've changed a bit how it works. Instead of forcing you to clear your transactions to balance your account, we now provide a checkbox that asks if you want to include unreconciled transactions or not. By default this will be on since most users prefer to just bring their entire balance up to date. We've also fixed the issue you were seeing when adding a comma. Hopefully this makes it easier to manage going forward.
03/27/2016 08:30:56
Kenneth
User
Account balancing is painful, am I missing something?
In the past I used MS Money and Moved to Quicken kicking and screaming a few years ago, but to date I have found nothing better. Maybe BudgetTracker will work, I do like that you can hide reconciled transactions and your account balances will reflect the correct balance, (unless you are in the balance process) Quicken does not and they do not plan to change anything. The only way to show an accurate balance is the show all transactions and I have 18 years of transactions in Quicken, most of which transfer from Money. I think the basic budgeting and bill management are acceptable from what I have found so far, but balancing/reconciliation is not so great. For years I have managed my accounts once to twice per month. Bills and deposits are entered in advance 15 to 30 days according to budgeted bills. I then periodically update my books with actual or other transactions as they occur and are reflected in my online accounts. I balance a couple of times per month and mark the cleared translations. I understand this is a manual operation with this product and that I must mark all cleared transactions before balancing and if things do not balance I must manually figure out what transactions are missing and add them accordingly. Even after doing this the un-reconciled transactions did not calculated into the account balance summary correctly. I have done this now a few times and I am currently running Quicken in parallel until I can build confidence in this product. Initially it seemed that the only way I could get things balance was if every transaction had cleared the bank.
After much frustration I discovered that this is not the case. If there is a comma entered into the Account Balance Summary Bank Amount during balancing both the Bank Amount and Difference are mis-stated. See below! The only difference in these were the comma entered in the balance process.
Comma Entered in Recorded Amount 7,902.96 Bank Amount: $7.00 Recorded Amount: $7902.96 Difference: $7895.96
Without Comma Entered in Recorded Amount 7902.96 Bank Amount: $7902.96 Recorded Amount: $7902.96 Difference: $0.00
I usually copy and paste the balance from my online banking and it has commas. This is good to know but probably something to check on. I have been able to replicate this easily.
