In microsoft.public.money, Ricardisimo wrote:

- quote -

I am not going to try try figure that out. However I think you may
have said that you think the account data and balances are correct ,
and you just want Money to recognize that it is balanced..

If you wish to start fresh and declare an account balanced, you can
mark all entries balanced. Select to show only unreconciled
transactions. Sort by date, and go to the oldest transaction.
Hold down Cntl+Shift+M and let auto-repeat work thru the
transactions until none are left showing. Then balance making the
starting and ending balance match the known balance. Choose the
balance date to be the day after your last transaction. This is
not the normal procedure.

"Mark" <abcd[at]abcd.com> wrote in
news:uxlcOugOEHA.3088[at]TK2MSFTNGP09.phx.gbl:

- quote -

this. No one seems to be understanding the situation here, but it's no
big deal. I'm waiting for one last response from Microsoft, then I'll
just fudge the numbers somehow. The short story if you're really
interested: every transaction in Money for that first month is also in my
bank statement, and vice versa. Sure enough, that first month balances
out perfectly:
"the difference between your statement and register is: 0.00 ---
When all transactions are cleared the difference should be zero. If not,
you can make an adjustment later."
Well, it does really, truly balance out to 0.00, so I shouldn't have
to make an adjustment. Aha! But some other part of Money doesn't agree.
It sees a discrepancy somewhere and absolutely, positively will not let
me finish balancing out that first month's statement without, one way or
another, subtracting $2.00 from the initial account balance. But, of
course, if I make any adjustments at all, the account no longer balances.
If I don't make any adjustments, we're back at square one.

Actually, my question wasn't about how you were planning on trying to
correct the problem.
My questions were on how you were seeing the problem in the first place:

When you click Balance This Account and get to the dialog where you "Enter
the following information from your bank statement", did yo initially simply
accept the Starting Balance that Money had already calculated, or did you
replace it with your own value?

2nd question: On that same dialog, Under the "Enter bank statement details"
had you entered a Sevice Charge or Interest Earned amount?

New question: If you adjust the Starting Balance by 2 dollars so that the
Starting Balance discrepancy goes away, is there some $2 transaction that
simply needs to be selected (Cleared), or one that is already Cleared that
shouldn't be, that will allow it to balance?

If you can't find it in the unreconciled view when Balancing, you can try
Tools - Find & Replace - Advanced Search - Amount (and enter $2). Be sure to
enter the appropriate info on the other tabs (e.g. the affected account on
the Account tab)

Most likely this is simply a matter of a missing or duplicate $2
transaction, or it was marked Reconciled when it should not have been.

Also, have you referenced the Starting Balance KB article:
http://support.microsoft.com/default...02&Product=mny

-Mark

"Ricardisimo" <notyerbiz[at]notmail.com> wrote in message
news:Xns94E9743DA4E0Dricardisimoearthlink[at]207.217.125.204...
- quote -

"Mark" <abcd[at]abcd.com> wrote in
news:#q1#zFdOEHA.808[at]tk2msftngp13.phx.gbl:

- quote -

I have no idea how I'm going to do it, just so long as starting on such-
and-such a date the balance is x. It might even just go down as "account
adjustment". Don't know yet. Wish me luck.

Are you overwritting the Starting Balance or leaving Money's calculation of
it as is?
Are you entering a bank charge/fee?

-Mark
"Ricardo M. Costa" <Ricardo[at]noneofyourbiz.com> wrote in message
news:Xns94E92268918FAricardisimo[at]207.217.125.203...
- quote -

Got me. I give up.

"Ricardo M. Costa" <Ricardo[at]noneofyourbiz.com> wrote in message
news:Xns94E92268918FAricardisimo[at]207.217.125.203...
- quote -

"Dick Watson" <littlegreengecko[at]mind-enufalready-spring.com> wrote in
news:OkEYFwVOEHA.3348[at]TK2MSFTNGP09.phx.gbl:

- quote -

balancing and reconciling. At the end of the first month's transactions,
"the difference between your statement and register is: 0.00", exactly
what it should be. At this point I have one month's worth of transactions
reconciled, namely the first month. All should be well in the Money
world. But instead Money insists that there is a discrepancy and will,
indeed, force me to disrupt the precious balance, and by exactly $2.00,
in one of the three manners I pointed out earlier.
Well, I'm seeing that it's just not going to be solved in my
lifetime. Someone at Microsoft talked me through the export/QIF bizness,
and that solved nothing. The difference after I isolated the troubled
account was the opening $1000... MINUS the $2.00!I'm going back to my
theory that I have to create a fictional earlier month's statement. As
long as come March 29th of 2002 the balance is $1000 (or whatever it is
in real life) I don't care how it gets done. I suspect that I can just
put $1002 as the opening balance, balance the fictional month, with the
obligatory $2.00 mystery account adjustment, and then I'll be off and
running. Hopefully. I'll let you know if it works. Too tired now to think
about it. Thanks for all of your help.

You say you set the account beginning balance to $1,000 and have no
reconciled transactions and are trying to balance versus a statement.

Given the "no reconciled transactions" condition, the statement better
report a beginning balance of $1,000 or Money will report a "Starting
Balance Discrepancy."

What's the beginning balance on the statement???

"Ricardisimo" <notyerbiz[at]notmail.com> wrote in message
news:Xns94E88C230F4D6ricardisimoearthlink[at]207.217.125.201...
- quote -

"Dick Watson" <littlegreengecko[at]mind-enufalready-spring.com> wrote in
news:uuuxqBIOEHA.3028[at]TK2MSFTNGP11.phx.gbl:

- quote -

I am very, very sorry to keep pestering you guys. Please just bear with
me a bit longer. OK, so I took care of the $900+ discrepancy (brainfart
on my part), but now I'm back to square one, and I've searched a couple
of FAQs and issue pages, but nothing quite matches my problem. Here it
is:
- Every transaxction is unreconciled in my favorite account, the Bank
of Spain account from your example.
- I enter my initial starting starting balance in account details,
which since it is in media res, is, say, $1000 rather than $0.
- I try to balance the account.
- I enter the pertinent details for that month's statement from the
bank.
- A dialogue box appears titled "Starting Balance Discrepancy" telling
me the starting balance calculated by Money doesn't match my entry, and
to go check transactions, preferably earliest to latest.
- The "Balance Account" worksheet page appears, and sure enough, "the
difference between your statement and register is: 0.00 --- When all
transactions are cleared the difference should be zero. If not, you can
make an adjustment later."
- I hit "Next" and get another dialog box with three options:
--Go back to balancing the account.
--Finish reconciliation without correcting the balance.
--Automatically adjust the account's starting balance (which
includes the amount in question [$2.00] and a category drop-
down list.
I've tried all three of these, and none works, for what is a very simple
reason, really: the account balances out without any need for a remedy.
But I can't get Money to see that no remedy is needed. If I do any of
them, the problem passes on to the next month. Hopefully this more
detailed description will help one of you to visualize my problem and
pronounce some magic words that a dunce like me can figure out. Right now
my head is spinning trying to figure out what I did to deserve this, and
what I can do to correct it. Thanks in advance once again for your
attention.
Ricardo

via_newsgroup[at]please.tnx(Cal Learner-- MVP) wrote in
news:76i5a0pmi5pm32rf3runmvkuhore54t5kj[at]4ax.com:


- quote -

No, they don't.

- quote -

So tell me something... just suppose that for kicks you wanted to balance
your favorite account all over again. What would happen with your accounts
on your computers if you were to manually go through and reclassify all of
the reconciled entries as unreconciled from day one to today, then tried to
balance the account again? Now suppose you were to do the same thing, but
you also wanted to add the previous month manually. What then? I'm
wondering if it all has to do with altering the starting opening balance
that first time, for whatever reason I did it. I seem to remember being
confused at some point about what month's statement was my starting point
and altering the starting balance accordingly, then trying to put it back
to where it was, but it was screwed by that point.

In microsoft.public.money, Ricardisimo wrote:

- quote -

Do the balances at the bottom of the register change when you change
the View? If so, look to the hidden transaction problem.

I have not been following the thread details, but that would not
seem to fit the description.

All manner of strange things can happen in the "corrupted" file domain.
Transactions that don't show in the views but somehow figure in the
calculations are not unheard of. The only ways to find these things are
cross-checking everywhere and when these otherwise unexplainable things show
up, you go off in routes like msmoney -s, salv.exe, and the other voodoo
stuff.

I'm thinking you may be headed there from the descriptions and extended
history. See http://umpmfaq.info/faqdb.php?q=104 and
http://umpmfaq.info/faqdb.php?q=130.

"Ricardisimo" <ricardisimo[at]earthlink.net> wrote in message
news:Xns94E7ABFB32D90ricardisimoearthlink[at]207.217.125.201...
- quote -

This is the part of the conversation where I start admitting to all
of the stupid things I've done which to this point I've conveniently left
out. Namely, the account in question was balanced perfectly up until about
six months ago, then something went wrong when I tried manually "catching
up" another account, a loan which was paid out of the first account, but
which, since there was no electronic statement for it, I'd been very lazy
about until that date. So then something goes horrifically wrong, and I
can't even recall what. The first account is no longer balanced, and I do
what I did way back when I first was getting to know Money: I unreconcile
every transaction and start over balancing again from day one. I have done
this many, many times in the past, and when all was said and done the
account always balanced out nicely. No longer. I'd like to know why. Mind
you, the problem was never there when I was relying exclusively on
downloaded statements. It started when I tried entering information in
manually.
My question at this point relates to the procedure mentioned earlier
with the QIF file and Notepad and such... can there possibly be "hidden"
transactions? Is there another way to check to see if Money is seeing
things that it will not show me? Thanks again.

Your descriptions keep conflicting with my experiences using Money over the
last eleven years and all versions except 1 and 98.

The fact that downloaded transaction data is, apparently, involved makes me
suspect at the get go. I don't download transaction data and don't have
these kinds of problems. I'd surely suspect that you downloaded something
that was already included in the account starting balance. <PREACH> My
recommendation to ALL new Money users is to skip doing any of this
downloaded data/ebanking stuff for several months until you get a grip on
what's going on and how Money works. Once you get all this working smoothly
by hand, then if you must, start creating havoc by downloading all of this
suspect data. Hopefully by then you will understand enough of the mechanics
to figure out how to clean up the mess.</PREACH
If I've had an account at First Bank of Spain since 1492, and create a
matching Money account in September of 2003, I have to pick the point where
the Money account will begin tracking the real world account. Let's say I
pick the statement ending August 28, 2003. The ending balance on the
statement, which I accept as an article of faith, is $1,234.56. That's now
the account starting balance for the account details in Money. EVERY
transaction that is included in that balance is EXACTLY irrelevant to my
handling of that account in Money. That's transactions from August 25, 2003,
and September of 1617. None of them matter. EVERY transaction that occurs
after that needs to be reflected in Money to stay in balance. They do
matter. It's a really simple dividing line.

IF the starting balance for the **first** statement I try to reconcile
against Money, the one from September 28, 2003, is not the exact same as the
ending balance of the August 28, 2003, statement I used to baseline the
Money account, then the BANK has a problem.

When I go to balance the Money account for the **first** time, if Money's
reported **beginning balance** doesn't match the **account details starting
balance** of $1,234.56, then there is only one explanation (save a corrupted
file): there are reconciled transactions in the account that should not be
reconciled. Indeed, there should be NO reconciled transactions in the Money
account if I haven't yet balanced the Money account. Given this discussion,
I see no point in even considering creating a fake month prior to the month
when the Money accounting began.

I also am concerned when you say

- quote -

If you *BALANCE* Money for a period with a $1,000 balance, and then, the
next time you balance in Money, Money reports a $998 beginning balance,
there is STILL only the one explanation I told you about back at the
beginning. (Again, excluding some kind of file corruption.) The reported
$998 beginning balance for the second cycle is NOT STORED by Money. It's
calculated. IF (account starting balance + sum(reconciled transactions)) =
$1,000 one day and $998 the next, then the ONLY thing that's reasonable to
have changed is the sum(reconciled transactions). The only way this changes
(short of some machine problem that prevents 2 plus 2 from adding up to 4)
is if transaction(s) that was (were) not reconciled when the $1,000 was
calculated is (are) now reconciled when it calculates the $998.

"Ricardisimo" <notyourbiz[at]notmail.com> wrote in message
news:Xns94E79221E955Dricardisimoearthlink[at]207.217.125.205...
- quote -

OK, I'm going to give you an example that hopefully will tell you what's
going on. Suppose I opened an account in 1998 at BigUSA Bank. However, I
only started using Money99 in April of 2000 (I've since purchased 2004
Standard in the hopes that it would resolve the problem, but no), and
that's my first downloaded statement from this account. The starting
balance for this first statement should be $1000. I'm having all of the
afore-mentioned problems, but all I want is for the starting balance in
Aprill 2000 to be $1000 and for Money to recognize that this month does
indeed balance out. Money, however, wants to start out at $998. OK, so I
create a "fictional" March 2000 that starts at $1000 and ends at $1000,
with no transactions in this period. So I make $1000 the starting opening
balance and balance the account. Guess what? It's still going to want the
opening balance to read $998. What is that?

"msmoney -s" FIXED the problem!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I can go to sleep now..

----- Shawn wrote: ----

I'm using Money 2001 and I'm seeing this EXACT same problem in my investment account (stock and cash). This happened after Ameritrade forced old Datek customers to swith to Ameritrade account settings in MS Money. I have years of transactions in these accounts, including transfers between these accounts. I'd hate to start over

Please help if you can!!

Shawn

I'm using Money 2001 and I'm seeing this EXACT same problem in my investment account (stock and cash). This happened after Ameritrade forced old Datek customers to swith to Ameritrade account settings in MS Money. I have years of transactions in these accounts, including transfers between these accounts. I'd hate to start over

Please help if you can!!

Shawn

I thought you were referring to the opening balance in the balance the
account dialog. That is, indeed, the total of the account beginning balance
(from Account Details) and all of the R marked transactions in the account.

If you are starting from day one--i.e., NO transactions entered in Money,
this should be equal to the account beginning balance from the account
details. If the account beginning balance is $0, the opening balance in the
balance this account dialog will also be $0. But it is still calculated.
It's just there are no transactions to calculate it against.

You wrote
- quote -

There can easily be a discrepancy between the calculated starting opening
balance and the value you entered as the statement's opening balance and yet
still have a $0 discrepancy at the bottom line.

Example:

Account beginning balance $100

Reconciled transactions in Money before balancing: $50, ($25).

Money's calculated starting opening balance: $125 ( = $100 + $50 + ($25) )
Statement beginning balance: $150
(note difference of $25)

Unreconciled transactions in Money: $30, $40, ($10)

Statement transactions: ($25), $30, $40, ($10)

Statement balance: $185
Money account balance: $185.
(note the match)

Of course, you should have a hard time matching the ($25) transaction that's
on the statement and not unreconciled in Money. This case, erroneously
reconciled transactions screwing up the match between the Money calculated
opening balance and the statement opening balance, is what I was trying to
offer one solution/explanation for.

Beyond that, I guess I'm not clear enough on your problem to help.

I do think that the technique you describe as "making a copy, deleting all
of the entries, and opening the result with Notepad" omits some details, the
most important of which is the export to QIF and editing the QIF. I'm not
sure the technique is applicable here, because I do not really understand
the problem you are trying to solve, but see
http://umpmfaq.info/faqdb.php?q=130 for more info.

Good luck.

"Ricardisimo" <notyerbiz[at]notmail.com> wrote in message
news:Xns94E6AA64C27FBricardisimoearthlink[at]207.217.125.203...
- quote -

"Dick Watson" <littlegreengecko[at]mind-enufalready-spring.com> wrote in
news:eK45OybNEHA.3124[at]TK2MSFTNGP12.phx.gbl:

- quote -

Well, no. The starting opening balance is the starting opening balance, no
calculation required. If I'm starting from Day One, it's zero. Otherwise
it's whatever I enter it in as in account details. Let's say I put in
$1000. Deposits and withdrawals for the first statement period work out to
-$500, so the ending balance should be $500, right? Well, yes and no. When
I balance the account, the difference between my statement and Money is
$0.00 which is perfect, but Money doesn't seem to agree. It tells me there
is a discrepancy in the calculated starting opening balance, and then what
do I want to do? Auto-reconcile? Can't find it. Manually check the account?
I fall for it every time, do it, account for everything. No discrepancy.
Balance the account without adjustment? I keep trying it, and then when I
get to the next month, it has adjusted the opening/closing balance by the
afore-mentioned $2.00. Only now it's a little more complicated. I'm trying
it at my work computer to see if it has to do with the actual computer, and
at work it's not $2.00, it's $900+. Very frustrating, very bizarre. Someone
elsewhere mentioned making a copy, deleting all of the entries, and opening
the result with Notepad. Any easy way to delete every entry? I assume I can
just delete the other accounts wholesale, no? Thanks in advance.

The calculated Opening Balance is calculated from the total of the account
beginning balance (from Account Details) and all of the R marked
transactions in the account. These discrepancies in opening balance are
usually the result of some transaction that is marked reconciled that
shouldn't be.

"Ricardo M. Costa" <Ricardo[at]noneofyourbiz.com> wrote in message
news:Xns94E414BA8666Ericardisimo[at]207.217.125.203...
- quote -