I have an account that I cannot reconcile. All my transactions match what is in the bank account. My envelope balance for this bank account matches the account total. But when I try to reconcile it still shows a balance of $53.00. I have searched for a transaction in envelopes and accounts for any transaction for $53.00 and there is none. But it is confusing because all my totals in Goodbudget for this account matches what I actually have in the bank for this account. And all my other accounts and envelopes balance with what there is in their respective bank or credit card balances.
Hi Lori, and welcome!
This has happened to me, and there are a couple of things to try:
First, since the reconciliation only looks for transactions within the specified period, make sure that the dates from your most recent transactions match the dates at the bank. For example, you may have transactions for $40 and $13 that you entered on Friday (so they show up as cleared transactions in your reconciliation) but which didn’t post to your bank until Monday (so they’re not included in this statement).
Next, have you ever reconciled this account before? If so, be sure the “previous balance” wasn’t inadvertently changed. Also, be sure you haven’t moved or deleted any reconciled transactions, which could also change that balance.
If it’s a credit card, be sure you haven’t marked any pending charges as cleared. And for some reason Capital One does something weird with their pending transactions. There’s a point when they don’t align at all, and even after calling CapOne they were pretty unexcited to fix this. If it’s a CapOne account, your best bet may be to only reconcile off monthly statements.
Finally, if you’re sure everything is correct but it just won’t reconcile, you can adjust the previous balance in the reconciliation by the amount it’s off and it should go to zero. That’s a pretty drastic step because it carries forward (Goodbudget only reconciles against the last reconciled balance) so make a note somewhere of the amount you adjusted in case you need it next month.
I hope it’s the first and simplest solution but if not maybe one of these others will help!
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Thank you…your answer made me realize that this has happened to me before a long time ago. I’ve had Goodbudget for many years and it’s hard to say what happened, maybe I had to delete a transaction after I reconciled the last time, but it probably would take more time to try and figure that out than necessary since all my physical accounts match perfectly with my Goodbudget accounts and I had no pending transactions on any of my accounts either. So what I did to fix is adjust the "previous balance by $53.00 then that fixed it to where I could “0” balance my reconciliation. I did make sure that once I completed, I went back into reconcile and saw that my new “previous balance” now matches perfectly with my bank balance so when I do reconcile again it should match perfect. Thank you for your help.
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