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Placeholder problems in Quicken for Windows 2017

Samuel Leishear
Samuel Leishear Member ✭✭
edited January 2019 in Investing (Windows)
Quicken for Windows 2017 (R2).  When I download my investments from Morgan Stanley Quicken says I have a task to review.  When I click on this, it acts like it is looking for a Placeholder, but no placeholder comes up.  When I go to Online, here is the Placeholders for sold transactions, but they are not in the Placeholders area at the bottom of the investment data.  I can manually enter this data into the transaction area and eventually in a day or so, Quicken will find it.  Is this a Placeholder problem or a download problem, or no problem at all.

Comments

  • markus1957
    markus1957 SuperUser, Windows Beta Beta
    edited January 2019
    I'm not clear if you are referring to actual Placeholder transactions or downloaded buy/sell transactions waiting for your review. If your buy/sell transactions are hanging up in Online Center, rather than displaying in the Downloaded Transactions tab as they should, try a file validation.

    You should not be letting Quicken add Placeholders at the frequency you describe or ever for that matter. In Edit>Preferences>Investment Transactions, check the box for "Show hidden transactions". If you have a bunch of placeholders, you need to get rid of them and replace them with actual transactions if necessary.
  • Samuel Leishear
    Samuel Leishear Member ✭✭
    edited January 2019
    They are buy/sell transactions. If I click on the tasks to perform, nothing happens.  Nothing appears at the bottom of the transactions.  No Placeholder or Downloaded Transaction.   I will try a file validation.  I do get rid of Placeholders daily.
  • markus1957
    markus1957 SuperUser, Windows Beta Beta
    edited December 2016
    Samuel Leishear said:

    They are buy/sell transactions. If I click on the tasks to perform, nothing happens.  Nothing appears at the bottom of the transactions.  No Placeholder or Downloaded Transaction.   I will try a file validation.  I do get rid of Placeholders daily.

    The "tasks to perform" is throwing me off. When my MS transactions download, they are displayed in the "Downloaded Transactions" tab at the bottom of the account register. I then click to Accept All or in some cases with Sells, a box pops up to confirm Lots which I click through. All I ever see is a Red Flag on the Account Bar when transactions have downloaded and need to be accepted.

    By any chance do you have your investment registers set in Edit>Preferences>Downloaded Transactions, to Automatically add transactions to the register? If so, consider unchecking that and accepting them as I describe.

    Let me know if the file validation helps.
  • Samuel Leishear
    Samuel Leishear Member ✭✭
    edited October 2016
    Samuel Leishear said:

    They are buy/sell transactions. If I click on the tasks to perform, nothing happens.  Nothing appears at the bottom of the transactions.  No Placeholder or Downloaded Transaction.   I will try a file validation.  I do get rid of Placeholders daily.

    Ok.  File Validation is complete.  I have the little red flag next to one of my Investment Accounts from MS.  It says I have 43 transactions to review.  I click on it and nothing happens.  The Downloaded Transactions at the bottom of the investment transactions contains nothing.  If I go to the Online Center, there the 43 are.
  • Samuel Leishear
    Samuel Leishear Member ✭✭
    edited October 2016
    Samuel Leishear said:

    They are buy/sell transactions. If I click on the tasks to perform, nothing happens.  Nothing appears at the bottom of the transactions.  No Placeholder or Downloaded Transaction.   I will try a file validation.  I do get rid of Placeholders daily.

    BTW.  By checking the show hidden transactions, I removed approx. 60,000 Placeholder transactions.  I had a report to help me remove them before, but obviously it couldn't see the "hidden" transactions.  Thanks.

  • markus1957
    markus1957 SuperUser, Windows Beta Beta
    edited December 2016
    Samuel Leishear said:

    They are buy/sell transactions. If I click on the tasks to perform, nothing happens.  Nothing appears at the bottom of the transactions.  No Placeholder or Downloaded Transaction.   I will try a file validation.  I do get rid of Placeholders daily.

    So for the "43" in Online Center, first try to click Update/Send in Online Center to see if that moves them to the register or clears them out if they are duplicates. If not, try temporarily setting the automatically add preference mentioned above to "On" by checking the box. Then perform a One Step Update for MS to see if the Red Flag clears. Then set the preference back to Off.

    60,000 placeholders might be a record. Here is a more robust file repair routine from Quicken you might consider using. How do I troubleshoot a damaged Quicken data file?
  • Samuel Leishear
    Samuel Leishear Member ✭✭
    edited April 2018
    I was going to try your solution, but when I opened Quicken, guess what, all 43 miraculously appeared in the Download Transactions list.  Thanks for your help.
  • Samuel Leishear
    Samuel Leishear Member ✭✭
    edited April 2018
    To the me too.  Just follow the suggestions above.  Especially stop the automatic acceptance into the transactions.
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