Quicken 2004 has bugs and Intuit's support is painful
Being a long time quicken user there are some operations I’ve come to dread. Switching from manual account reconciliation to automated reconciliation is one of them.
Sure enough, after downloading a few months of transactions and attempting to resolve the duplicate transactions I was left in a situation where either the reconciliation balance could be made correct or the register balance could be made correct, but not both at the same time. Reconciliation seemed to have the better of it, since getting the register to balance required either modifying the accounts opening balance or adding an adjusting transaction.
The thing that seems to screw it up is deleting reconciled transactions. Why this is a hard thing for the poor program I have no idea.
What really compounds the injury however is the response of Intuit’s customer support. Perhaps it’s the only way they’ve found to insulate themselves from the hordes of people calling with problems, but the “pay first ask later”, “it’s not a bug it’s a feature and we charge for help with features” approach is extremely frustrating when facing the simple fact that the program either can’t add or that it’s keeping numbers to itself that it isn’t showing you on the screen. I don’t care how you slice it; it’s a bug, and a rather inexcusable one in a piece of accounting software.
Fortunately during a previous interaction with customer support I acquired a bit of Quicken magic: Holding the control and shift keys down while selecting the FileàValidate operation causes “Super Validation” to run.
Sure enough, the “super validation” log reported “removing 9 records not in register”. You might ask: “If they weren’t in the register, where were they removed from?” But I was much too happy restoring my opening balances to the original values and getting on to more interesting things in life than double checking Intuit’s accounting software.