Sell all shares, not that many shares available

Unknown

I'm attempting to sell all shares of a security in one of my accounts. On the Sales transaction screen, I check the 'Sell all shares in this account' box and the number of shares held, 198, is populated into the 'Number of shares' box. I enter the price received and the commission and when I hit Enter/Done, I get a 'Number of shares selected is more than the available. Maximum available shares on this security is 197' What?

If I selected the security from the Investing page to bring up the Security Detail View, it shows
Shares Held 198

I'm running Quicken Premier 2018, Version R12.15, Build 27.1.12.15 on a Windows machine running Windows 7.

Any thoughts?

Thanks.

Jim_Harman

When you enter the price received, is that the "Total Sale" amount you received or the price per share?

To avoid problems with round-off errors, it is usually best to enter the to enter the total amount and let Quicken calculate the price per share.

q_lurker

Jim Harman said:

When you enter the price received, is that the "Total Sale" amount you received or the price per share?

To avoid problems with round-off errors, it is usually best to enter the to enter the total amount and let Quicken calculate the price per share.

Jim's comment is relevant to each acquisition (Buy Shares, ReinvDiv, etc.).  I suggest you review each applicable transaction and make sure the 'shares' are accurate to your chosen precision (I always use three digits after the decimal point.)

Any suspect transaction, you may need to delete and re-enter.  Toward that direction, you might want to see if you can enter a Sell for all shares after any such acquisition -- just to determine that as of that point in time, Quicken had the data correct.  

Stock splits are another possibility that may have caused some level of mis-fit data.  

Unknown

Jim Harman said:

When you enter the price received, is that the "Total Sale" amount you received or the price per share?

To avoid problems with round-off errors, it is usually best to enter the to enter the total amount and let Quicken calculate the price per share.

When I entered the price received, I entered per share and let Quicken calculate the Total Sale amount (which it did correctly).

I have had instances following stock splits where there are tens-of-thousandths or hundreds-of-thousandths of shares that I needed to clean up. In this case, Quicken is showing the number of shares owned as exactly 198 shares, no fractional shares. Quicken must have some very small fractional share that it is rounding up to 198 but is not showing me.

There is a stock split in the history that I'll take a look at but it seems like Quicken has a bug with way share counts are displayed (in the Investing summary, the security detail view, and the 'sell all shares') and the way shares are reconciled in a sale transaction.

Frustrating.

Jim_Harman

Jim Harman said:

When you enter the price received, is that the "Total Sale" amount you received or the price per share?

To avoid problems with round-off errors, it is usually best to enter the to enter the total amount and let Quicken calculate the price per share.

If you try entering the Sell all as I recommended, letting Quicken calculate the price per share, does it let you do that or does it still complain that there are not enough shares?

Alternatively, you could try selling 197.9 shares, then 197.99 etc to see how close you can get before it complains. Hopefully you can get close enough that it doesn't matter.

In the past, I have been left with some tiny fractions of shares that throw off my net worth and other reports by a few pennies. I never did track them down.

Mike Curran

My wife and I have separate taxable investment accounts with some of the same securities in each.  My problem is, when I "Sell all shares in this account" Quicken (for some reason) includes more shares than I own, but not as many as my wife and I own in total.  And the "holdings" for my account shows the correct number of shares.  Odd. 

I just ended up entering the total shares I own and didn't check the "sell all shares" box.  That worked, but seems like a bug...

q_lurker

@Mike Curran That sounds to me as if somewhere back in time, you got one or more of your wife's Buy or Reinvest transactions recorded in your account rather than hers.  I'd be looking at portfolio views back in time (as of dates) and comparing to statements from the brokerages.

Mike Curran

@q_lurker Thanks, but my and my wife's investment account statements match what I have in Quicken, so seems doubtful that what you've described is what happened.  In any case, no biggie.  thanks again.