My cash balance for investments are incorrect.

Robert Lynch

I use ADP Retirement Services.  I just downloaded 5 years of transactions and imported.  The value of my securities are correct.  However, the total value of the account is not.  I do have outstanding loans on the account as well, but quicken is not displaying this correctly.  Not sure where to go from here.  Any help is appreciated!

Michael Heady

I have the same issue with a Fidelity 401k Rollover account. I have considered just making a one time manual adjustment to the cash balance but haven't done so yet for fear it will screw up the reports for this year.

John_in_NC

Investment accounts are direct connect, so Quicken is doing nothing more than presenting what ADP presents. You will have to figure out why the cash balance differs. (We can't see the data or know what your balances should be, so, as much as we would like to help you, we are limited.)

I don't deal with ADP Retirement Services, so I don't know how they handle loans and how that affects your cash balance. I would start by looking into that. Comparing what they show on their website might help give you some information.

Lyn Buddenhagen

After my initial download into QM2017 (from QM2007), I had to go through a huge project to compare the holdings as of a past date, to the statement for that date (which I had kept, whew). Since I started using Quicken in 1990, there were a huge amount of transactions and I'm thankful as much was transferred as I got. I had made several errors over the years which are now corrected. I agree I feel uncomfortable with adjustment entries but that's a personal decision. Note: QM2017 will add adjustment or bookkeeping entries in order to make your current shares match the download source - they'll be the oldest transactions in your Quicken transactions, and in gray. I kept deleting them until my records were correct. That's #1.
#2: For current downloads, with my 401k through Merrill Lynch Retirement Services (chosen by employer), Quicken downloads show reinvestments as purchases - thus debiting cash from the 401k instead of showing the dividend received and reinvested to the penny. Of course in a 401k you should never have any cash left. My current workaround is whenever I download transactions, I change each 401k "buy" to a "reinvest" transaction. I have the cash balance column shown in Transactions, so I can monitor this. Hope they fix this but am not counting on it. Long answer but I hope it helps you.

Tom Young

While the value of the securities on a market value basis might be correct, that certainly doesn't mean the cost basis is correct.  (Even in a retirement account cost basis can at times be an important value to know.)

The financial institution providing the information to Quicken determines how much history is available to download; you are not in most cases getting the entire history of an account from inception to date of download. 

When you download security information one thing that happens is that there's a comparison between the holdings "per Quicken", (which might only include all the information you just downloaded), to the holdings "per the financial institution."  if there's a difference between the two Quicken suggests a "placeholder" entry to get the number of shares, bonds, etc. to match the financial institution's numbers.  If you accept the placeholders then the security market value numbers in Quicken will match the financial institution's, (so many shares of Security A at a per share market value of $x), but the cost basis number won't match because the transaction information received is missing part of the history.

Of course the same thing can happen with cash.  So if the financial institution downloads 5 years worth of cash activity, but the account has been open for 9 years, there's no way the cash balances can match. 

If you don't care about the cost basis of securities you can simply accept the placeholders getting the market value of security holdings to match.  If you don't care about the missing 4 years worth of cash activity, (given the example), you can simply enter an "opening balance" adjustment, dated before the date of the 1st downloaded transaction, to get the cash balances to agree.

If you do want an accurate cost basis figure then you'll have to somehow enter manually the missing 4 years worth of data.