Balance Accounts

You'll use the same procedure to balance a checking, savings, money market, or credit card account. You'll need your bank or credit card statement. First, you enter your statement closing balance, and then you match transactions on your statement with transactions in your Quicken account register.

Before you begin, you should make sure that you have entered into Quicken all transactions that occurred between the date of your last statement and the date of your current statement. If you need to reconcile for more than one month, you first need to reconcile your account with the bank statements for each of the prior months before you try to reconcile the current month's statement.

To get started, open the register for the account you want to balance, then choose Cash Flow > Reconcile (Activities > Reconcile). The Statement Summary (on the Mac it's called Reconcile Startup) dialog appears. The Opening Balance field will be filled in (with the ending balance from the last time that you reconciled; if you have never reconciled before, you may have to go back and reconcile a prior month).

In the Ending Balance field, enter the ending balance from your bank statement, and enter your statement closing date in the New Statement Ending Date field. If the account has a service charge associated with it, enter it in the Service Charge field, and enter the date the charge was applied to your account (often it's the same date as the statement closing date). If necessary, choose the Category for the service charge. If the account earns interest, enter the amount, date, and category of the interest payment. Click OK. The Reconcile dialog opens.

Any service charges or interest payments will show up in the Payments and Checks section already cleared. Compare your bank statement with the transactions shown, and click on each transaction that matches. As you clear each transaction, a check mark appears next to it in the Clr column.

If you need to change a transaction (perhaps because you originally entered it incorrectly in the register), double-click the transaction in the Reconcile dialog to open the account register and edit it. To add a missing transaction, click the New (New Transaction) button in the Reconcile dialog to open the account register and make the addition.

As you check off each transaction, Quicken updates the Difference figure in the lower-right corner of the dialog. Once you check off all the transactions, that figure should be zero. If it is, click the Finished (Finish) button.

If the Difference amount is not zero after checking off all transactions, skip to correct differences on the next page to find out how to correct the problem.

If you balance successfully, the Reconciliation Complete dialog appears. On Windows, if you want to create a reconciliation report (you usually will not), click Yes. Otherwise, click No. In the account register, the transactions you checked off will be marked with an R in the Clr column.