Buy security manually puts in bogus "Add Cost Basis" entry

Unknown
Unknown Member
edited June 2018 in Investing (Mac)
I detest auto download of securities so I have disabled all (that I can find) downloading of security and portfolio data.  If I wanted auto downloading, I would use a cloud system.  The entire point of Quicken, for me, is to keep track of EXACTLY what I want to put in it, and nothing more, nothing less.

Now I'm trying to buy a security.  I added a Buy transaction.  But the # of shares total did not update!  Looking at the security transactions (Portfolio, open the triangle by the security), I see the Buy is there... but there is also a bogus transaction, it says Add Cost Basis with a number of shares equal to the negative of what I tried to buy!!  I also tried Add Shares, same thing.

In other words, somehow it decided that I had 135.986 shares of this security and by God it's going to force me to STAY at that value no matter what!!  So any time I try to add shares, it puts in a negative entry (with no cost basis) so the total number stays the same.

This is no doubt left over from when it did an auto download during my 2007->2016 upgrade (much to my consternation, and which took me an hour to undo from all my securities - had to go manually delete all the transactions I did not want).

So how can I tell it "completely ignore anything you might possibly have learned online" and get it to update my share balance properly?

I'm using Quicken Mac 2016, version 3.5.3.

Comments

  • Unknown
    Unknown Member
    edited December 2016
    I'm having this issue, too.  I recently upgraded from a Windows version of Quicken which I had been using in 2014.  I migrated the file to Mac 2017 a few weeks ago (which seemed to go very well).  The first time I entered a reinvested dividend from December 2014 (earlier today) it seemed to go fine.  But the portfolio tab didn't increment the number of shares.  It wasn't until I was on the phone with support that I noticed the first line under the "portfolio summary" which negated the number of shares halfway down the screen which were involved with the reinvestment.  What is especially frustrating is that I see similar notes written TWO YEARS AGO -- and the problem still persists.  The fact that Intuit has not responded to Robert, above, in two months is disconcerting, as well.

    BTW I have never used automatic downloads for this particular account;  it worked fine in the Windows version.  The support person was aware of this issue and said that she expected a fix to come out in "about a month."

    Given that this has always worked on Windows (at least for the past decade or so) I am surprised that this problem has been around in the Mac version for such a long while.

    Intuit: I volunteer to be one of your beta testers for this fix.  I'm a software developer and believe I could add value to the process.

    In the meantime, can you give us a statement of direction with this?  I'm trying to play catch-up from 2014 and I am happy to enter a dozen or two transactions to get caught up IF the problem (and the system-generated 'adjustment transactions') can be easily deleted once the fix is in place.

    I'm using Quicken 2017 for the Mac Version 4.3.1 (Build 43.14810.100). 
  • mshiggins
    mshiggins SuperUser ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited March 2017
    Bill, Intuit spun off Quicken in March this year. If you want to sign up to beta test for the new company (Quicken Inc), you can do so here:



    https://quickenbeta.centercode.com/we...

    Quicken user since Q1999. Currently using QW2017.
    Questions? Check out the Quicken Windows FAQ list

  • jacobs
    jacobs SuperUser, Mac Beta Beta
    edited March 2017
    Bill: This forum isn't a place where Quicken typically responds to users. Quicken Support is for user-to-company help. This site is primarily for user-to-user help. If you expect to see Quicken developers responding to questions or problems here, you will be disappointed 99+% of the time. 

    Also: Quicken Windows and Quicken Mac are two completely different products, built on different technologies at different times, and with different programming teams. Quicken Mac, which was started over from scratch this decade, still lags Quicken Windows in many features because the small Quicken Mac team hasn't gotten to lots of things yet.

    I'm not sure from reading the description above, but I'm not sure this is a Quicken bug; it's Quicken's not-so-intuitive way of telling you there's a placeholder transaction Quicken created in your investment account you need to hunt down and delete or fix. (In Quicken Help, search for "placeholder" and click on the first link for "Cost basis / Resolving out-of-bound securities / Placeholders" for additional information about this.
    Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 1993
  • Unknown
    Unknown Member
    edited January 2017

    I'm having this issue, too.  I recently upgraded from a Windows version of Quicken which I had been using in 2014.  I migrated the file to Mac 2017 a few weeks ago (which seemed to go very well).  The first time I entered a reinvested dividend from December 2014 (earlier today) it seemed to go fine.  But the portfolio tab didn't increment the number of shares.  It wasn't until I was on the phone with support that I noticed the first line under the "portfolio summary" which negated the number of shares halfway down the screen which were involved with the reinvestment.  What is especially frustrating is that I see similar notes written TWO YEARS AGO -- and the problem still persists.  The fact that Intuit has not responded to Robert, above, in two months is disconcerting, as well.

    BTW I have never used automatic downloads for this particular account;  it worked fine in the Windows version.  The support person was aware of this issue and said that she expected a fix to come out in "about a month."

    Given that this has always worked on Windows (at least for the past decade or so) I am surprised that this problem has been around in the Mac version for such a long while.

    Intuit: I volunteer to be one of your beta testers for this fix.  I'm a software developer and believe I could add value to the process.

    In the meantime, can you give us a statement of direction with this?  I'm trying to play catch-up from 2014 and I am happy to enter a dozen or two transactions to get caught up IF the problem (and the system-generated 'adjustment transactions') can be easily deleted once the fix is in place.

    I'm using Quicken 2017 for the Mac Version 4.3.1 (Build 43.14810.100). 

    After talking to tech support on the phone I noticed that there were transactions that were being inserted to keep the # of shares the same. The thing is, these extra transactions were the *earliest* on the list... I.e. They were at the very bottom of the list. Which is why I couldn't find them earlier. Deleting those auto-generated transactions fixed the problem and allowed the # of shares to change correctly. So there's the workaround.


    Oddly, after a while these extra transactions seemed to stop being entered. Maybe it decided I wasn't downloading so it allowed the total to adjust again.


    Anyway, the trick is to look for these extra transactions at the earliest possible date and delete them.


    Hope that helps...


    -Bob
This discussion has been closed.