Need help with some mis-applied financial informaiton

Moondoggy_1

I have an inherited IRA where each year I'm required to take an annual distribution.  When this distribution takes place and the transactions are downloaded from Edward Jones Investments, I have a 50-50 chance that Quicken is going to mis-apply the downloaded transactions to the wrong accounts and this year was no exception.

This is what actually happened:

Shares held in the IRA were sold and the proceeds from the sale got placed in an internal cash holding account held by Edward Jones Investments.  The proceeds were then withdrawn from that cash holding account and used to purchase shares in a Non-IRA investment account I also have with Edward Jones Investments .

Here's what Quicken did with the transactions:

Quicken shows the sale as a debit in the inherited IRA but incorrectly shows credit being made to my wife's IRA account which did not occur.  Quicken then shows a debit being made to my personal checking account and a credit being made to the Non-IRA account as a sale. 

One would think that I should be able to simply change the account in the distribution transaction from my wife's IRA account to another account and then change the debit transaction in my checking account to that same cash account so that the debit and credit offset each other but Quicken is making my life difficult because each time I attempt to do this, I get an error message that states that "This account is not able to have a cash balance". .

So....  Can anyone tell me how I can correct this mess in my account as right now my wife's IRA account is overstated by $3500 and my checking account is understated by that same amount.

Please note that this is Quicken Premier 2016.

Jim_Harman

Have you tried deleting the problem transactions and re-entering them manually? For transfers, you will probably have better luck deleting from the source account rather than the destination.

Unknown

I agree.  If this is a once a year event, just enter the transactions manually.  

Unknown

For what it is worth this doesn't sound like a Quicken problem, it sounds like a problem with what your financial institution is sending.

Data sent to Quicken is separated by account numbers.  So all Quicken really knows is that XXXX account got YYY transaction.

With the exception of a linked cash account Quicken doesn't move transactions from one account to another.  It doesn't even know the "to account" when you are talking about a withdraw/transfer.

Jim_Harman

Perhaps people who have this sort of problem have their preferences for downloaded transactions set to "Automatically add" or are hitting "Accept all" when they have downloaded transactions. 

I think it is important to review each downloaded transaction to make sure everything is correct before accepting it, especially transfer accounts.

Moondoggy_1

I called Quicken Support and was on the phone with a rep for over an hour.  To make a long story short they (Quicken) blamed the problem on the transactions downloaded from Edward Jones aka garbage in, garbage out.  The weird thing was that while working with me we created a new Qdata File and we then added Investments from Edward Jones and downloaded the transactions and this time they correctly went to the correct accounts.  Based on this I question whether the downloaded transactions were really the problem. 

Anyway, what made things difficult is that the distribution from the inherited IRA did not show the capability of performing a manual withdrawal from the account and I was never able to change the account shown in the transaction to the regular investment account.  I was however able to finally find a way to get the money transferred from the incorrect account where quicken placed the money to the regular investment account which then caused the regular investment account to be overstated but I was then able to delete the bogus transaction from my checking account which then brought me back into balance.  Let me simply state that the way I ended up fixing this issue for my investment account, my wife's IRA account and my checking account but it left my inherited IRA a bit messed up.  From a stock perspective, the number of shares in that account is correct and the value for the shares is spot on but because this distribution was incorrectly handled, the account balance is still overstated but I can live with this error.  I wish there was a way to offset this overstated amount with sort of memo transaction but like I said the menu doesn't offer any transaction option that would facilitate this.

Please note that if the above doesn't make sense, the whole issue is so convoluted that I spent all day working on it and I still don't understand what went wrong and why Quicken will not allow me the capability of manually fixing the issue so I gave up after fixing the majority of my issues.  

Unknown

Moondoggy_1 said:

I called Quicken Support and was on the phone with a rep for over an hour.  To make a long story short they (Quicken) blamed the problem on the transactions downloaded from Edward Jones aka garbage in, garbage out.  The weird thing was that while working with me we created a new Qdata File and we then added Investments from Edward Jones and downloaded the transactions and this time they correctly went to the correct accounts.  Based on this I question whether the downloaded transactions were really the problem. 

Anyway, what made things difficult is that the distribution from the inherited IRA did not show the capability of performing a manual withdrawal from the account and I was never able to change the account shown in the transaction to the regular investment account.  I was however able to finally find a way to get the money transferred from the incorrect account where quicken placed the money to the regular investment account which then caused the regular investment account to be overstated but I was then able to delete the bogus transaction from my checking account which then brought me back into balance.  Let me simply state that the way I ended up fixing this issue for my investment account, my wife's IRA account and my checking account but it left my inherited IRA a bit messed up.  From a stock perspective, the number of shares in that account is correct and the value for the shares is spot on but because this distribution was incorrectly handled, the account balance is still overstated but I can live with this error.  I wish there was a way to offset this overstated amount with sort of memo transaction but like I said the menu doesn't offer any transaction option that would facilitate this.

Please note that if the above doesn't make sense, the whole issue is so convoluted that I spent all day working on it and I still don't understand what went wrong and why Quicken will not allow me the capability of manually fixing the issue so I gave up after fixing the majority of my issues.  

Note it is possible that some how the accounts are "cross referenced" or something like that.  Of course if that was true I would expect all the transactions to go to the wrong account.

As for the account balance in the Inherited IRA being wrong there is two ways to handle that.  One is delete the bad transactions and put in the ones that should be there, or just put in a balance adjustment.

To add a balance adjustment, click on the action (gear) icon, and select Update Cash Balance.