July 26, 2009

• The Quicken Mismatch of Death

  I think I’m ready to talk about this now.

  Y’all be supportive and hand-holdingy while I get this out, okay?

  I was about a year behind in reconciling my checkbook.  (Bad Sarah.)  I was making tons of progress, but since I had a years’ worth of work to do, I wasn’t bothering about making sure my final Quicken balance was the same as my final checkbook balance.

  I know.  It seemed reasonable at the time.

  So, about six months’ into the process, I realized that $8.57 was about as close as it was coming.  As far as I could tell, I had gotten to a point where everything that was in my checkbook was also in Quicken.  They should have been matched up.

  My first step in looking for a mismatch is to quickly glance through the checkbook and Quicken for an entry with that exact amount.  Because the best mistakes are the ones that are easy to find.

  No such luck here.

  Then I check for entries that are for half the amount in question–maybe I put a deposit in the withdrawal column or some such.  Because the second-best mistakes are the ones that require only one second’s worth of math.

  $8.57 being an odd number, I was forced to skip this step.

  My third step is to get out the calculator and recalculate all the checkbook entries.  I usually do the math in my head, which amazes and terrifies Stephen, but which, again, usually seems like the reasonable thing to do.  I usually only make an arithmetic mistake once or twice a year.

  Well, I had eight months’ worth of entries to check.  And I did indeed have two arithmetic mistakes in those eight months–one worth $1.34 and another worth 45¢.  One was back in December, the other in March.

  After finding the first, I hopefully checked for entries of $7.23–maybe I only made two errors?  And one was an easy one?

  Alas, no.  And I continued on to find the 45¢ mistake.  I paused briefly to see whether I could find a $7.68 entry, or a $3.84 entry, but I was once again SOL.

  The next step is among the more tedious tasks in the universe–all the more so because the mistake which necessitates it is so very stupid.  You have to go through each month’s statement and verify that every entry appears in both Quicken and your checkbook.  You’ve already done this once, of course–when you were originally reconciling the statements.  But you missed something.  And now you have to go back and do it again.

  This takes a very long time.  Especially when you have to go through eight statements.

  I finally found an $8.45 charge at Costco (in April) that was in Quicken but not in the checkbook.  (That’s usually the way it goes when you get to this level.  Since Quicken won’t let you finish with a statement unless everything is there, it’s usually the checkbook that’s out of whack.)

  But.

  I was still 72¢ off.  I checked hopefully for entries of 72¢, hoping that my last little step could be that easy.  I checked for entries of 36¢.  I knew it couldn’t be the arithmetic, since I’d done everything with the calculator since then.  But I redid the arithmetic anyway.  I finished out the last two months checking that each entry was in both places.

  And I was still, annoyingly, persistently, excruciatingly, 72¢ off.

  So I had to do the last level of checking.  This is the most painful of all, since you’ve already checked each entry at least twice against the statement.

  But you have to check every d@mn entry one more time.  Minutely.  You have to make sure that every entry is entered correctly into both Quicken and your checkbook.

  I was spared in at least one respect–I found the dreaded error in only the second of the eight months I had to comb through.  (If it had been in the eighth month, I think I still would be looking for it.)

  I had transposed a 19¢ into a 91¢.

  Four.  FOUR mistakes.  None of them at the “easy” level.

  Stephen is very sweet and tries to commend me for being so “conscientious” and “thorough” when tracking down these mistakes.  It’s almost consolation enough.

  Almost.

  • 5:55 pm
  • 6 Comments