More "Quicken-Like" Reconciliation Error Finding
Hello,
I haven't used Quicken in many years. I've generally been very happy with Moneydance. But here is one situation where I remember Quicken was significantly superior -- tracking down an error in reconciling that is many months ago. I don't remember the details but somehow Quicken was able to keep track of how previous reconciliations were changed.
Regards,
Steve
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1 Posted by Steve on 23 Jan, 2018 04:09 PM
Following up on my own post. This credit card has about a four year history. So I used a divide and conquer approach. I marked the last two years as uncleared and found the error to be 0. I was able to zero in on a transaction in a statement but not in Moneydance for the amount of the error. I then happened to find a sticky note buried on my desk mentioning that the transaction in question was never marked as cleared (no yellow diamond, no green circle) but I had a warning when I deleted it. (I usually go back and delete very old transactions that are uncleared assuming I entered them by mistake. I have no idea what happened here.
I also remember more about what quicken does. I now recall it provides a summary listing of previous reconciles with the current difference in reconcile amount. In this case it would have shown an error of $42.39 going back to the 4/2016 reconcile. The ones previous to that would have shown 0 error. I know it may be difficult to add but that is a really nice feature.
Another idea that goes back to balancing a checkbook by hand. My father said rather than just put a check in the ledger when a check reconciles, it is better to put a number representing the month it reconciled.
Steve
2 Posted by office.quest on 11 Apr, 2018 06:50 PM
Not a solution per-say, but an idea that MD could use to accommodate your needs.
Back in my corporate life, I think we ran across what you are talking about every once in a while. The asset management system we were using at the time tracked transaction date and entered date (we did not deal with cleared date as every thing was checked by hand.) Anyway, we could run certain auditing reports by entered date instead of transaction date (just basic headings not formatted for client reporting). If a past year accidentally got entered instead of the year the transaction was actually for, we could find it; change the year to the correct one, problem fixed. If MD tracked this kind of field (I know it's a lot to ask), then you could run the report for the time period between when you actually balanced the time period that used to be correct and now is not correct through the current day. At least it would narrow down the possibilities.
I think the system we used could be run to see deleted transactions or not, because sometimes the problem is that a transaction gets deleted when it should not have. If you don't discover that there is an error until the next time you reconcile, the "Undo" function is of no use, too many entries since error actually occurred.
3 Posted by office.quest on 11 Apr, 2018 07:18 PM
Steve,
I think you have a really good understanding of the process needed to finding and correcting transactions in MD. I have a question, that I am sure you can answer.
I ran some basic reports / searches by Category, and I am sure there are items missing. Is there a process that you use to find those errors? Like a set of reports that pick up oddly entered transactions that hang out in no man's land?
I'm really curious about the steps you go through to make sure Categories (that are not reconciled to any real "statement") are included in all the reports that you run?
Thank you,
4 Posted by office.quest on 05 Jun, 2018 09:14 PM
Steve,
OMG, I am so sorry, when I have gotten on Infinite Kind, I had not seen this until today.
In case you haven't figured out a better way,
I have gone to the Extension "Find & Replace."
Leave "All Accounts" Leave "All Categories"
**Change the "and - intersection" to "or - union."
Select Custom Dates, enter the date range you are looking at.
If you want to include "transfers" make sure to check box on the left side of right 1/2 of the screen.
This will generate a lot of transactions that are lurking out there. Then click top of column like account or category it will sort by account, you will probably have many transactions with no account, sometimes this gives you a place to start looking. I think it lets you go to that a transaction if you double click. If that looks good, take a look at the "other side" of the transactions. I think I found really strange things that happened when I deleted stuff & changed stuff and it didn't pick up all connected information.
I deleted stranglers or corrected things as I found them. Be careful, as soon as you run the report go to bottom left side & UN-check all transactions, then you can check only the ones you want to change. Also, make sure you use the Replace & Replace All buttons and check it is all what you want; it will NOT update until you click "Record" then all changes to all marked transactions will be recorded.
Good luck, and again I am so sorry,
Alisa
System closed this discussion on 04 Sep, 2018 09:20 PM.