combine accounts

Unknown

I have two separate accounts each with the same mutual fund that are being combined at Vanguard. How do I combine the accounts in Quicken but keep the historical activity? Thanks.

UKR

I think that would be equivalent to "transferring holdings from one Quicken account to another" ...

In Quicken, go to the old account's investment register. Click the "Enter Transactions" button and choose "Shares transferred between accounts". Select the mutual fund or "All Securities" (if / as needed).
This will result in a number of transactions appearing in both the destination account and the old (original) account. You lot history will be transferred intact.

However, if you have already downloaded and accepted transactions for the new account, you will have some cleanup to do to delete the downloaded "Add Shares" transactions as they are now duplicating your holdings ...


Note:
Do be sure to have or create a backup of your Quicken data file before you get started with this. Just in case something were to go wrong ...

VicM

@UKR
When transferring the shares between accounts, are the original dates ported over or are all the transactions listed as being done on the date showing in the "Enter Transactions" window?

Jim_Harman

When you use the Shares Transferred between Accounts macro transaction, Quicken removes the currently held shares from the old account and adds the corresponding tax lots to the new account, preserving the original purchase dates and cost basis. The original transactions remain in the old account.

VicM

Jim,
Thanks for your input.
However, I don't seem to be getting what I'm looking for. It's probably because I made a bad decision to begin with.
The situation is that on one of my investment accounts I split out one mutual fund and one cash fund into two separate accounts thereby creating 3 accounts where there was only one. When I get my statements, I have to manipulate 3 accounts. What I would like to do is recombine them as though I'd never split them out.
Sadly because I've done this over a couple of decades, there are many transactions in the split-out accounts that I'd like to recombine into the original account. When I try using the Shares Transferred macro, I would have to do each transaction individually to preserve the dates and I also have to enter the number of shares for that transaction. Also when the transaction appears in the original account it's listed as 'Added', when in fact it was a Reinvestment. Clearly that would be very labor intensive.
I can create a report with all the transactions and export the report to an Excel compatible format. What would be ideal would be the ability to then Import that report/Excel info into the original account since it contains all the pertinent info, and I can change the holding account name in the Excel sheet to the original account name where I'd like the transactions to reside.
From what I've seen so far, this is not doable in Quicken. Perhaps that's something Quicken/Intuit might consider.
Thanks,
Vic

Jim_Harman

@VicM
I think you are misunderstanding what the Share Transferred Between Accounts does.

As we have said, it does not move all your original transactions to the new (combined) account. These are preseved in the old account so you can still use them for reports, performance tracking, etc.

The Shares Transferred moves your current holdings including all the acquisition dates and cost basis from the old account to the new one. If you have 1 security and 50 tax lots in the old account, it will create one Removed transaction in the old account, bringing the share count to zero there, and 50 Added transactions in the new account, each with the correct acquisition date, share count, and cost basis.

I suggest you make a copy of your data file and give it a try.

Another option if you are using the Subscription version of Quicken is to select the old account, click on the gear at the top right, and select Move Transactions. This lets you move selected transactions from one account to another.

It sounds like this is more what you had in mind, but it can require some cleanup if for example your old transactions include transfers to or from accounts that no longer exist in Quicken. Read the instructions carefully before doing this and make sure you have a backup of your data file in case you do not like the result.