Why? Mistakes happen more than you might realize. Checks are processed by scanner these days, not humans. Sometimes the scanner misreads a digit. My mom's handwriting isn't what it used to be and this has happened 2 or 3 times in the past couple of years. When I look at the check, I can tell what it was intended to say but I can also understand why the scanner misinterpreted it.
Not intending to hijack this thread to be a Quicken thread, but this is another thing that I feel Quicken does better than my old paper check register or even my excel spreadsheet. In the paper register, I would just write one line item when I paid my credit card "Visa Bill $1000" but no granularity into what that $1000 was actually spent on -- I would have to look it up on my statement or cc website. Now, as credit card transactions come into Quicken I categorize them a couple times a week and I can get real numbers of what I spent money on, across all accounts regardless of whether I paid by check, credit card, debit card, etc. We rarely spend cash but if I take out money from the ATM for a specific purpose -- say, over $100 -- that gets properly "categorized" too.
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By the bank, very few. By me, many more.
Our credit cards give a year-end summary broken down by category: dining, auto, travel, etc. I still wouldn't know how much I spent on pizza, though.
That might make sense for folks who write a lot of checks, several per week, but almost none of us do that anymore.
You can adjust your target checking account balance depending on your level of spending.
+1 I download transactions from Quicken every few days using One-Step Update and review/accept the downloaded transactions over my morning coffee. I reconcile to the downloaded balance every so often.
I haven't had a bank error in 20 years or more. If you "commonly" find mistakes you need to move to a different bank.
Definitely not a common occurrence. And as I said, I mainly find mistakes I made which are more common and even more important.
I run Quicken at least once a day generally, and I try to account for every charge and payment that I can. This is mostly useful for keeping track of things for financial archeology later, end-of-year spending evaluations, and a general understanding and feeling of control.
Right, we don't write many checks either, but I have a lot of automatic withdrawals, and it would be nice to see the whole picture of what the reserve is to know when and how much to add.
Nice.
