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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I have this problem on my wife’s freee account (not seen it on my paid account yet). Goodbudget is not bringing forward the last reconciled balance, it is impossible to reconcile. I can reconcile by changing that incorrect brought forward balance but the problem persists the next time I reconcile.
Hi ColinG,
It sounds like something changed in the reconciled transactions since you did the reconciliation. If you’re sure everything else is correct, you’ll need to adjust the “last reconciled” balance by the amount it’s off so that going forward everything will be correct.
For example, if the balances are off by 5.00, you’ll need to enter a “previously reconciled balance” that’s 5.00 different from the actual amount. Going forward it should pick up the balance today, so you won’t have the issue come up again. That doesn’t happen very often, but when it does it can be difficult to find the source of the discrepancy. I hope this helps though!
I did that Tiffany and it still brings forward the wrong balance (the same one). I also deleted all records and started again and it is still doing the same thing. It is not clearing the previous recs out when doing a clear all records.
Are you using Bank Sync or doing a manual reconciliation? If it’s bank sync then I’m a little out of my depth; I never switched over to the auto-imports so it could be related to that, sorry.
It’s a manual reconciliation (on a free account) and I have just cleared all data and started again and it is still remembering that incorrect brought forward number when reconciling. So not even a fresh start is not curing it. It happens in Safari and Chrome so looks like a bug at the Goodbudget end of things.