make placeholders appear at current end of transactions, and don't automatically create unwanted one

Unknown

I kept wondering why QMac2017 was reporting a greater valuation for one of my portfolios than online (which doesn't support downloads so everything is manually entered.)  When, I found that I had missing a zero in a fraction share transaction (entered 0.36 when I was supposed to enter 0.036)  The cost basis was right, but market value was huge...but share prices matched....

So, I edit the transaction, and nothing changes. I don't see any recent transactions that would account for no correction.  So, I expand the investment on the Portfolio view, and see there's a transaction at the top wanting me to add missing values.  And, adding/entering are the only options for this erroneous entry.

But, entering it and then immediately deleting it didn't do anything....as it immediately re-creates the unwanted placeholder.  What makes it think the wrong total holdings that I'm trying to fix is the correct value?

Don't recall what it did with QWin2016, but certainly not this.

I had noticed that when I was entering the placeholder, that it had a well before the existence of my account as its initial date.  I opened the account in August 2016.  The initial date was for 2001.  Why that date, I don't know....it doesn't represent the start of my quicken date (November 1997)...shortly after when I had caved and bought my first Windows PC, and migrated my mix of freeware accounting software (which I found, when trying to decide on what to switch to from QWin2016, was still an active product.  I didn't try any of the products I looked at, when I opted this route.)

So, I scrolled down to the other end of my transactions, and there' s the placeholder, which is preceded by 3 other placeholders with a date of one day before I had opened the account.

But those reverse share adjustments that my broker had made to correct rounding errors, there's was no value associated with, just an add of 0.000001 of a share.  Can't check if the amounts are right, until February's statement comes out.  

As an annoyance their website only shows 2 digit precision on holdings, while they do 6 significant digits...which can lead to transactions with 8 digits after the decimal.  They also do 6 significant digits on the reinvestment amount, which quicken rounds off to 2 digits.  In QWin2016, I've had to force an extra round up or round down, since its doing the 2 digit round off on a per transaction basis, rather than my whole contribution....

More of a problem when its a small amount spread over many investments, more than a dozen, which is the case with a different account then above, the last few years, I've been largely letting the recommender tool do its recommendation.  (it used to be a secret tool, which when meeting with an advisor, they would run.... I got the path during that meeting.  A couple of years later the tool became openly available.)  Instead of where I pick one investment for a given slice recommendation.  The change to a few investments to many came about some time after online quicken updates became possible (before you had to dig deep into the website to find the download item.  Which I could never remember where it was each time...)  Yet, I still find myself entering the transactions manually, and then comparing with download.  Occasionally, I have add a penny to make things work...since Quicken rounds off on a per transaction basis, rather then taking into account the entire transaction.

I don't have the account as part of my one-step, since there's two investments (daily interest) that continually get reported as add shares 0 with the comment of updating balance, but no balance adjustment is done.  So, I manually update once in a while, so I don't have to deal with the holdings don't match, what should I do, after every download.  Where in QWin2016, I had go through steps to create  a placeholder (which has the date of that the download had associated with the value (i.e. I do an update on Sunday, it'll report the date as Friday....though the 'add shares 0' downloaded transaction will have current date.)

So, when I re-setup accounts in QMac2017, I didn't take this account out of 'update all online accounts'...but I noticed I wasn't being hassled out the holdings difference.  Well, turns out its go the updates the day before my first entry. (back in 2007)... takes a while to scroll all the way to the other end (maybe I should change my scrollbar behavior...)  Though QWin2016 would also for some reason move my transactions position to the beginning after and reconcile, leading to a long scroll to get back to current transactions (but it didn't do anything to that end.)  In QWin2016, the current/future transactions are at the bottom (since there's the separate section below for downloaded transactions, reminders[, placeholders])  Which isn't the case with QMac2017 (though it puts the toolbar at the bottom versus across the top as in QWin)  It was after the discovery for the first account, that lead me to look at the other end of this other account.)  Which might be annoying.  As it has been my practice to turn them into a real transaction at the end of the year (providing I remember to go online on New Year's Day....)

I keep meaning to try 'franking' (details were on a site somewhere, but I can't find the bookmark now) to adjust things so reinvested dividends don't change my cost basis, to get the true roi.  Hmmm, looking at all my investment accounts, they all have at least one placeholder....including one because Quicken insists on recording a downloaded split from quotes into my accounts, instead of how the broker and reported it my transaction download.  The CUR one was complicated by the fact that the split resulted in my fractional shares turning into whole shares (sharebuilder) ... not sure how to fix that one.

RickO

I will admit I didn't read your whole post, but did you try just selecting the placeholder transaction and hitting the Delete key?

Lyn Buddenhagen

Dear Dreamer, wow you sound frustrated. I don't have many things reinvested currently, but a 1/31/17 downloaded dividend reinvest (QM2017, El Capitan, Merrill Lynch Retirement for my 401k) DID work automatically, with four decimal places, all in one transaction. I have version 4.4.3, the latest for Mac. (I've been hesitant to upgrade to Sierra from El Capitan, not knowing if QM2017 is fully compatible with Sierra.)
I have also edited transactions and the changes worked fine. 
Maybe start fresh in the morning and try again?
For placeholders, I agree that it would be nice for them NOT to be entered automatically, and NOT for them to appear before my first-ever transaction. Generally a placeholder entry indicates a problem - usually on my end - but I am now "trained" by QM2017 to look after each download. 
I've used Quicken for Mac since 1990 so I had huge numbers of transactions to migrate from QM2007, and I have to say it did a great job. Fortunately I had many of my old statements, so I buckled down one day and changed the date in portfolio view back to a statement date, then compared the holdings and number of shares, and hunted down what were essentially my errors historically. I did delete placeholder entries first, and that worked for me too. Keep in mind that any placeholder entries are a result of downloads, to make the Quicken shares match what is actually in the account you are downloading from.
BTW, reinvested dividends SHOULD change your cost basis: it's like you got the dividend in cash, then bought more shares - the amount of the dividend is your cost basis for the new shares.
Hope this gives you enough to go on....

RickO

Lyn Buddenhagen said:

Dear Dreamer, wow you sound frustrated. I don't have many things reinvested currently, but a 1/31/17 downloaded dividend reinvest (QM2017, El Capitan, Merrill Lynch Retirement for my 401k) DID work automatically, with four decimal places, all in one transaction. I have version 4.4.3, the latest for Mac. (I've been hesitant to upgrade to Sierra from El Capitan, not knowing if QM2017 is fully compatible with Sierra.)
I have also edited transactions and the changes worked fine. 
Maybe start fresh in the morning and try again?
For placeholders, I agree that it would be nice for them NOT to be entered automatically, and NOT for them to appear before my first-ever transaction. Generally a placeholder entry indicates a problem - usually on my end - but I am now "trained" by QM2017 to look after each download. 
I've used Quicken for Mac since 1990 so I had huge numbers of transactions to migrate from QM2007, and I have to say it did a great job. Fortunately I had many of my old statements, so I buckled down one day and changed the date in portfolio view back to a statement date, then compared the holdings and number of shares, and hunted down what were essentially my errors historically. I did delete placeholder entries first, and that worked for me too. Keep in mind that any placeholder entries are a result of downloads, to make the Quicken shares match what is actually in the account you are downloading from.
BTW, reinvested dividends SHOULD change your cost basis: it's like you got the dividend in cash, then bought more shares - the amount of the dividend is your cost basis for the new shares.
Hope this gives you enough to go on....

Lyn,

QM2017 4.4.3 is fully compatible with macOS Sierra. Only caution is that if you enable Sierra's ability to sync the Desktop and Documents folder with iCloud Drive, be sure you do not store your Quicken file in one of those folders (it will eventually get corrupted).

Lyn Buddenhagen

Lyn Buddenhagen said:

Dear Dreamer, wow you sound frustrated. I don't have many things reinvested currently, but a 1/31/17 downloaded dividend reinvest (QM2017, El Capitan, Merrill Lynch Retirement for my 401k) DID work automatically, with four decimal places, all in one transaction. I have version 4.4.3, the latest for Mac. (I've been hesitant to upgrade to Sierra from El Capitan, not knowing if QM2017 is fully compatible with Sierra.)
I have also edited transactions and the changes worked fine. 
Maybe start fresh in the morning and try again?
For placeholders, I agree that it would be nice for them NOT to be entered automatically, and NOT for them to appear before my first-ever transaction. Generally a placeholder entry indicates a problem - usually on my end - but I am now "trained" by QM2017 to look after each download. 
I've used Quicken for Mac since 1990 so I had huge numbers of transactions to migrate from QM2007, and I have to say it did a great job. Fortunately I had many of my old statements, so I buckled down one day and changed the date in portfolio view back to a statement date, then compared the holdings and number of shares, and hunted down what were essentially my errors historically. I did delete placeholder entries first, and that worked for me too. Keep in mind that any placeholder entries are a result of downloads, to make the Quicken shares match what is actually in the account you are downloading from.
BTW, reinvested dividends SHOULD change your cost basis: it's like you got the dividend in cash, then bought more shares - the amount of the dividend is your cost basis for the new shares.
Hope this gives you enough to go on....

Rick, thank you for your reply! How can I find the syncing with iCloud Drive preference? I don't think I use it to store anything, but I know Apple often sets preferences the way that will benefit Apple (i.e., more stored so you need to pay for more storage space in the cloud). 

RickO

Lyn Buddenhagen said:

Dear Dreamer, wow you sound frustrated. I don't have many things reinvested currently, but a 1/31/17 downloaded dividend reinvest (QM2017, El Capitan, Merrill Lynch Retirement for my 401k) DID work automatically, with four decimal places, all in one transaction. I have version 4.4.3, the latest for Mac. (I've been hesitant to upgrade to Sierra from El Capitan, not knowing if QM2017 is fully compatible with Sierra.)
I have also edited transactions and the changes worked fine. 
Maybe start fresh in the morning and try again?
For placeholders, I agree that it would be nice for them NOT to be entered automatically, and NOT for them to appear before my first-ever transaction. Generally a placeholder entry indicates a problem - usually on my end - but I am now "trained" by QM2017 to look after each download. 
I've used Quicken for Mac since 1990 so I had huge numbers of transactions to migrate from QM2007, and I have to say it did a great job. Fortunately I had many of my old statements, so I buckled down one day and changed the date in portfolio view back to a statement date, then compared the holdings and number of shares, and hunted down what were essentially my errors historically. I did delete placeholder entries first, and that worked for me too. Keep in mind that any placeholder entries are a result of downloads, to make the Quicken shares match what is actually in the account you are downloading from.
BTW, reinvested dividends SHOULD change your cost basis: it's like you got the dividend in cash, then bought more shares - the amount of the dividend is your cost basis for the new shares.
Hope this gives you enough to go on....

After upgrading to Sierra, open macOS System Preferences. Click iCloud. If iCloud drive is checked, click its Options button (or uncheck iCloud Drive). Make sure Desktop & Documents option is unchecked. See screenshots below.

Unknown

Lyn Buddenhagen said:

Dear Dreamer, wow you sound frustrated. I don't have many things reinvested currently, but a 1/31/17 downloaded dividend reinvest (QM2017, El Capitan, Merrill Lynch Retirement for my 401k) DID work automatically, with four decimal places, all in one transaction. I have version 4.4.3, the latest for Mac. (I've been hesitant to upgrade to Sierra from El Capitan, not knowing if QM2017 is fully compatible with Sierra.)
I have also edited transactions and the changes worked fine. 
Maybe start fresh in the morning and try again?
For placeholders, I agree that it would be nice for them NOT to be entered automatically, and NOT for them to appear before my first-ever transaction. Generally a placeholder entry indicates a problem - usually on my end - but I am now "trained" by QM2017 to look after each download. 
I've used Quicken for Mac since 1990 so I had huge numbers of transactions to migrate from QM2007, and I have to say it did a great job. Fortunately I had many of my old statements, so I buckled down one day and changed the date in portfolio view back to a statement date, then compared the holdings and number of shares, and hunted down what were essentially my errors historically. I did delete placeholder entries first, and that worked for me too. Keep in mind that any placeholder entries are a result of downloads, to make the Quicken shares match what is actually in the account you are downloading from.
BTW, reinvested dividends SHOULD change your cost basis: it's like you got the dividend in cash, then bought more shares - the amount of the dividend is your cost basis for the new shares.
Hope this gives you enough to go on....

Yeah, I'm starting to question why I stuck with Quicken now.

While originally, I had a first generation quad core i7 3.2Ghz w/HT running Windows7, until the intel fake raid's need to reinitialize my disk mirror after every bsod resulted in blocks of swiss cheese....took me over a year and half to dig through the data and mostly recover (part of the problem was I had been doing backups to a vendor specific raid5 like storage (that could expand if I added another disk to it...only had 4 out 5 drive slots filled then.)  Which the installer wouldn't recognize to try to recover my microsoft's image backup, or my 3rd party time-machine like product.  Though eventually I found to access the drives (using a cd based os) and had successfully copied both backups to a pair of drives that I was had to span together to have enough room.  But, one of the disks died before I could figure out how to get it back to the Windows box.  Ended up, extracting only the image backups (since I could mount the .VHD files...)  since I had decided that I would install try to install Ubuntu and run Windows 7 under VirtualBox (since while this main computer was out of action, I had been using an older computer running Ubuntu with a Windows XP VM in VirtualBox, and getting by, plus I found many posts of other people find Windows much more tolerable running it in a VM.

However, I couldn't get Ubuntu to work with my video card.  Hearing that ZFS under FreeBSD was much more robust than it was (at the time under Linux, as fuse),  I opted to install that as my host OS instead.  Even though I was limited to running a single CPU VM on the host, it was sufficiently usable.  The CPU I had lacked some hardware virtualization support that makes multiple CPU VMs work properly....namely that adding CPUs was making my Windows system slower and slower......

Then along comes a 2014 MacMini....i5 1.4GHz, 2 cores + HT....  I tried to figure out how to have both desktops visible, but eventually abandonned the FreeBSD one (leaving it as a 'headless' server....not really, since there's no serial port on it, so have to switch cables when there's something I can deal with through ssh.  I have other headless FreeBSD servers in my home that do have serial ports that I access them through.)  So, I exported/imported the VM across to the Mac....and it actually seemed just as fast.  Probably because I had upgraded to a 512GB SSD when I installed El Capitan.

At I had QWin2014....it was slow to start and slow with certain operations, but read about changing the default tab and learned to avoid the old home tab, even though the multi-account account graph was nice there....I had a positive account and a negative account.  And, the goal was to keep the difference line on the positive side....most of the time, avoid dropping the average daily balance below thee threshold and get dinged with a $10 service charge.  Things got even slower after I upgraded to QWin2016.  I later upped the CPU count for the VM to 2.

Part of the problem might that I have records back to 1997 (though I have on occasion searched through transactions that far back....like to find record of when I had purchased my Sleep Number 5000 bed, and found that it is still within its 20 year warranty.

But, every time I've thought about archiving....I find need to dig through the records, so can't decide where the divide should be....  plus there's the having to upgrade my main file and the archive(s) each time I upgrade Quicken consideration.

So, decided its time I tried moving to something native on Mac.  And, it looked like QM2017 might be close enough to be tolerable.  Versus dumping things out as QIF files (which I had back in November when I first started looking) to migrate to something not Quicken.  Well, so far despite all the issues that have cropped up in the conversion to QM2017, things haven't been quite as bad as the trial had gone....since each side of at transfer is separate transactions in quicken....there was going to be a lot of work to get things to match again....  or categories being a bigger mess than the QM conversion.  Some categories had different names so it left its category in with mine.  But, I didn't notice that it was matching the wrong one as I was recreating some transactions, so had go back and fix things and delete the extras.

But, the other product didn't seem to get Categories:Sub-Categoriy with occasion /tags, because I had used them, but then turned them off.  But, it didn't remove them....just hid them.  Except with scheduled transactions, it appended them with a slash to the category....which then goes in that way when (auto)entered.  I had cleared out the aberrant tags before converting to QM2017, but forgot to deal with my scheduled transactions.  Though in the report it had errored some of my tags as duplicating an existing category. Not sure what it did then....but I finished off killing tags.

I had used tags back when I needed to record all my purchases in monthly diaries, where its categories were different pages in the booklet, and I found it easier to generate a monthly report grouped by tags to fill things out.  Then to constantly flip through it to find the correct page to enter a given purchase/expense on.

But, I have no need for them now, and probably won't ever need to go back to find them, so there was no issue to me in removing them.  Though don't think I saw any way to turn off the tags field in QM2017.  I also find the way fields are ordered in split entry a bit strange compared to what I was used to.  Like when I do a big trip and buy things from different budget categories....I'll definitely need to split things....but process had been to enter the item description from receipt in notes, and then figure out what category to put it in (there's some sub-categories that I should probably rename or something....maybe I'll get around to doing that next year,) and then enter the adjusted price of the line item...and later figure out where the rounding differences go. OTOH, perhaps tags would solve some the overloaded sub-categories....hmmmm....might have to play around to see if I can get useful reports....

Unknown

RickO said:

I will admit I didn't read your whole post, but did you try just selecting the placeholder transaction and hitting the Delete key?

I did discover yesterday, that if I double click the placeholder, I'm given the choice of "Add Transaction" or "Add Guestimate".....though the first time I missed that it had set some random date in the middle of my register rather than possibly replacing the 0 share add share transaction that I receive with the updated balance for that holding.

Not sure how to deal with the missing 0.00005 shares because there was no cost reported for them, due to rounding differences between Quicken and my broker's records.  But, the adjustment won't have a cost.  In another case its over a missing 0.000034 shares of one fund and 0.00003 shares of another fund.

Guess that's what happens when Quicken seems to be using N decimal digits precision, while broker is using X significant digits....and some reinvestments result in really small fraction shares....

Meanwhile....I do find it really annoying that in the conversion that it had renamed all my securities (of the ones where it found tickers for....not sure if I have a case of an old ticker get repurposed for a new company....or is that even possible.

Even more annoying there's no way to search my transactions by ticker now.

In QWin, I had prepended the names with their ticker (only caused issues when symbols change or there's been a split/reorg.  Because in such cases...they report that the old share by name has changed to some other symbol (on broker website it had XYZ-OLD as the symbol change, but quicken would take a name that way so its a string 4 digits + 2 letters which mean something somewhere, and that new name (as all caps) has the old symbol.

Quicken will report that it can't find a stock with old name, and it can't find a stock with new name.  And, ask to create, but it doesn't show the details surround why its asking about the official name (so it usually results in me picking the wrong one as the current stock and the other....  and whether it did the right thing with my cost basis.  (something I think I might have to go through at some point...)

While the fact that in the 1:13 reverse split of a stock, my exchange of fractional shares resulted in rounding up a whole share.  Which QWin recomputed the split ratio, but in the investment update it insists there be the proper 1:13 exchange as a single transaction (and it just didn't want to cope with the 6 transactions that I downloaded regarding the split.)

Hmmm, didn't see a repair option....is such thing not necessary?

Guess it means I won't see it wanting to re-enter missing splits every time I do a repair.

Unknown

Lyn Buddenhagen said:

Dear Dreamer, wow you sound frustrated. I don't have many things reinvested currently, but a 1/31/17 downloaded dividend reinvest (QM2017, El Capitan, Merrill Lynch Retirement for my 401k) DID work automatically, with four decimal places, all in one transaction. I have version 4.4.3, the latest for Mac. (I've been hesitant to upgrade to Sierra from El Capitan, not knowing if QM2017 is fully compatible with Sierra.)
I have also edited transactions and the changes worked fine. 
Maybe start fresh in the morning and try again?
For placeholders, I agree that it would be nice for them NOT to be entered automatically, and NOT for them to appear before my first-ever transaction. Generally a placeholder entry indicates a problem - usually on my end - but I am now "trained" by QM2017 to look after each download. 
I've used Quicken for Mac since 1990 so I had huge numbers of transactions to migrate from QM2007, and I have to say it did a great job. Fortunately I had many of my old statements, so I buckled down one day and changed the date in portfolio view back to a statement date, then compared the holdings and number of shares, and hunted down what were essentially my errors historically. I did delete placeholder entries first, and that worked for me too. Keep in mind that any placeholder entries are a result of downloads, to make the Quicken shares match what is actually in the account you are downloading from.
BTW, reinvested dividends SHOULD change your cost basis: it's like you got the dividend in cash, then bought more shares - the amount of the dividend is your cost basis for the new shares.
Hope this gives you enough to go on....

Well from a tax point of view, the dividend does change cost basis.  But, from a what my gain on investment point of view, it should be part of the gain, so effectively not change my cost basis (or get detected and accounted some other way, idk)

... to get gain compared to my initial investment.

Wonder how it might handle when I leave the dividend as cash...though would I want to wrap my head around having used the accumulate dividend from one stock to buy another....