The whole point of balancing is to assure that the reconciled balance in
your Money file matches the reconciled balance at the bank. Marking a
transaction in the Money file as cleared, while balancing, when that
transaction has not cleared the bank, seems a recipe for problems. My
assumption is that the uncleared e-pays are in the Money transactions and
not yet in any downloaded data from the bank or visible on a bank statement
you are trying to balance Money to.

Re. "Every couple of months my starting balance gets way off"--it would seem
that at some point you'd want to understand a root cause for this problem.
Money defines the starting balance for the Balance Wizard very simply: it's
the sum of the R marked transactions plus the account beginning balance from
Account Details (or Account Settings, as the case may be). IF the starting
balance for this session with the Balance Wizard does not match the
reconciled Ending Balance from the last successful Balance Wizard session,
there should only be one cause ("corruption" excluded): some transactions
got marked R in the interim. Were I seeing this "starting balance gets way
off" condition, I'd consider printing (or copying to Excel or a Notepad
file) something like the last sixty days worth of transactions--as far back
as I had to go to get all unreconciled transactions plus a month or
two--after I balanced. If the staring balance disagreed the next time I used
the wizard, I'd whip out the report I saved and start looking for
transactions marked R in the database that weren't there when I saved the
report. When I find it/them, the question needs answered: where'd it come
from? How'd it get marked Reconciled???

"RHinNC" <rhinnc[at]hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:O7sK3HPMGHA.2300[at]TK2MSFTNGP15.phx.gbl...
- quote -

In microsoft.public.money, RHinNC wrote:

- quote -

That's up to you. The normal balancing procedure should work for
you, rather than the catch up method. The things that are not
cleared are not cleared.

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.


How Money Calculates the Starting Balance
http://support.microsoft.com/default...B;EN-US;138960

Every couple of months my starting balance gets way off.

Using the information located on the unofficial microsoft.public.money FAQ I
force Money to balance.

Today while balancing my starting balance was a couple of thousand dollars
off again.

I have several e-payment transactions that have not cleared yet. Should I
wait until these clear electronically or should I go ahead and follow the
instructions for catching up in the FAQ?

Thanks