Incorrect Realized Gain

Roy M

Quicken Home & Business 2017, Version R4, Build 26.1.4.5, Windows 2010 Pro
Problem: I have a money market mutual fund purchase of 1.04 shares at $1.00 per share that is resulting in realized gain of -$92,233,720,368,547,758.04 (negative).  I have deleted the transaction and the gain goes away.  When I reenter the transaction to get the shares in balance, the gain returns.  Changing the date does not seem to help.  I have validated the file, and it returns: "Corrected 1 Bought or Shares Added transaction that was incorrectly categorized as a realized gain."  Any ideas as to how to fix?

NotACPA

That bizarre number is the largest negative number that Q can hold ... and it indicates that you've got a SEVERELY, perhaps irreparably, corrupted Q data file.

You can try a File Validation (FILE, File Operations, Validate and Repair ... being sure to check "Validate FILE" before you click OK, OR

You can try restoring from a backup file until you find one that doesn't exhibit the problem.

Roy M

UGH!!!   Going back through the backups, it appears that the problem arose when I did ran YE procedure from 2015 into 2016.  I have tried both running the year-end process and the copy file process from within Quicken on my current file, but neither was successful at undoing whatever the year-end process did last year.  The last 2015 file is about 8 months old, and that would be a ton of work to roll that forward.  The report where this problem was highlighted is one I use only around year end, so that is why I was not aware that the rollover function had caused this corruption sooner.

I am attempting to export the data from the current file into QXF and then reimport in a new file.  After creating the new file and before importing, it looks like I will need to create the investment accounts, as the QXF import function will not create those.  That is a task for tomorrow.  After that, I can see if the bad data still carries over.  But any other suggestions would be appreciated.

RM

Roy M

Update: The QXF route did not work, even with the accounts created.  Quicken help on QXF Exporting and Importing includes the following statements: "The import and export of investment and business accounts, transactions, budgets, attachments, reports, and application settings is not supported by QXF. . . .If you need to import investment or business data, we recommend that you use QIF import instead."  And then on the QIF page "QIF import is not available for checking, credit card, savings, 401(k), or any other brokerage accounts."   

So I have a corruption that appears to have been caused in the rollover process, none of tools that I know to be available to me can fix the corruption, and none of the options in Quicken allow for the export from one file and import into another file of transactions in investment accounts.  The investment account transactions go back almost 20 years, so they cannot be downloaded from the brokerages themselves.  Thus it appears that I need to go back to my files as of 8 months ago and roll all accounts and reconciliations forward to now or I need to start with the new file with the accounts I was able to import and add the (approx. 600) investment account transactions.  

Please tell me I am missing some reasonable solution here.

Thanks.

q_lurker

Roy M said:

Update: The QXF route did not work, even with the accounts created.  Quicken help on QXF Exporting and Importing includes the following statements: "The import and export of investment and business accounts, transactions, budgets, attachments, reports, and application settings is not supported by QXF. . . .If you need to import investment or business data, we recommend that you use QIF import instead."  And then on the QIF page "QIF import is not available for checking, credit card, savings, 401(k), or any other brokerage accounts."   

So I have a corruption that appears to have been caused in the rollover process, none of tools that I know to be available to me can fix the corruption, and none of the options in Quicken allow for the export from one file and import into another file of transactions in investment accounts.  The investment account transactions go back almost 20 years, so they cannot be downloaded from the brokerages themselves.  Thus it appears that I need to go back to my files as of 8 months ago and roll all accounts and reconciliations forward to now or I need to start with the new file with the accounts I was able to import and add the (approx. 600) investment account transactions.  

Please tell me I am missing some reasonable solution here.

Thanks.

The QIF comment is generally misleading.  See: https://getsatisfaction.com/quickencommunity/topics/faq-how-to-import-qif-files-into-non-cash-accoun...  It still applies.

Roy M

Thanks q.lurker.  After some experimentation, that seems to be working.  Balances are not currently correct, so I need to review accounts to see if beginning balances are missing or if transfers are duplicated.

Roy M

Update: except for one 401(k) account, I was able to export and import via QIF my investment accounts.  I cannot figure out why that one account will not import, as the data is in the QIF file.   Another 401(k) account came in without problems.  But a lot of reconciliation is needed around the other investment accounts and related transactions in other accounts.
  

Roy M

Update (probably final one): I think I have reconstructed my Quicken file.  Very tedious.  I was able to get that final 401(k) account to export and import when I broke it into smaller files.  However, during the process of using Notepad to add the header as described in the link from q.lurker, sometimes it defaulted to an Encoding of UTF-8 when I went to save the edited file.  I realized I needed to make sure it saved with an ANSI encoding.  That might have solved other problems sooner had I spotted that.

Thus, I brought what base information over using QXF I could, and then brought the investment accounts (from the beginning of time to make sure cost basis was preserved) using the export and import process via QIF.  This resulted in a lot of duplicate transactions in the registers and transactions being added to registers where the transaction was already reflected in the existing Opening Balance.  Even more so when I connected with banks and broker.  So those are what were tedious and took a lot of time.  

Knowing what I know now, I think I should have restored from a backup before the problem occurred and then exported and imported subsequent transaction using QXF and QIF,  That likely would have saved a lot of clean-up in pre-2016 years.  The main item I have left is to recreate bills and reminders if I cannot figure a way to import.  

Thanks for the help.

RM

Unknown

My problem is the same but different - I do not have a year-end process - and the buy transactions are dated in March 2017.  The amounts are losses of less than 2 dollars (two different transactions - two different securities).
  I also have deleted and reentered the transactions - with the _RlzdGain posting with each.

q_lurker

Bob Richardson said:

My problem is the same but different - I do not have a year-end process - and the buy transactions are dated in March 2017.  The amounts are losses of less than 2 dollars (two different transactions - two different securities).
  I also have deleted and reentered the transactions - with the _RlzdGain posting with each.

@Bob Richardson: 

Did you validate (a copy of) the file?  Super-validate?

Did you try restoring a recent backup?  Even though the transactions are March 17, you may be able to recover with a more recent backup.  Be aware of the auto-backups in addition to those you initiated.