Quicken® 2010 For Dummies®

Chapter 8. A Matter of Balance

In This Chapter

• Choosing the account you want to balance

• Telling Quicken to balance an account

• Giving Quicken the bank statement balance

• Entering monthly service charges and interest income

• Marking account transactions as cleared or uncleared

• Verifying that uncleared transactions explain the account difference

• Checking for errors: What you should do if your account doesn't balance

I want to start this chapter with an important point: Balancing a bank account in Quicken is easy and quick.

I'm not just trying to get you pumped up about an otherwise painfully boring topic. I don't think balancing a bank account is any more exciting than you do. (At the Nelson house, we never answer the "What should we do tonight?" question by saying, "Hey, let's balance an account!")

My point is this: Because bank account balancing can be tedious and boring, use Quicken to speed up the drudgery.

Selecting the Account You Want to Balance

This step is easy. And you probably already know how to do it, too.

1. Click the Banking tab.

   Quicken displays the Banking window.

   The Banking window lists information about your bank accounts (as shown in Figure 8-1).

2. Click the account that you want to balance.

   Quicken displays the transactions tab, or account register, for the account.

Figure 8-1. The Banking window.

Balancing a Bank Account

As I said, balancing a bank account is remarkably easy. In fact, I'll ...