Brokerage Account Reconciliation Process

Unknown

I have several brokerage accounts I reconcile monthly. I’m on the latest release of Quicken 2018 Home & Business.



I frequently download transactions and security data from my institutions.



Reconciling is necessarily a two step process. Cash reconciliation and portfolio reconciliation.



Cash reconciliation is reasonably straightforward but to reconcile the portfolio you first have to again set the statement date then compare portfolio values.



If the portfolio values don’t agree then you need to painstakingly go through every security to confirm holdings and unit price to find the error.



Sometimes a portfolio may have different types of securities (stocks and bonds for example). Generally the printed statements gives subtotals for holdings by type. Quicken however offers no such facility as far as I can tell. So users are left to flip all around paper statements to reconcile line by line with the alphabetical ordered portfolio view.



Could you beef This up by creating a brokerage account reconciliation process that you only need to put the date of statement in once and that allows reordering and subtotalling of the portfolio view in order to help more quickly find inaccuracies.



Thank you

Unknown

Jim_Harman

Unknown

K.O. (Win-Premier)

mshiggins

Have you looked at the Portfolio? It has 18 fully customizable views and each of those views can be grouped by account, industry, security, security type, investing goal, or asset class.

Jim_Harman

splasher

I believe that there are only two important # for each security, basis and # of shares.  Trying to compare a security at Market Value (Q vs brokerage) requires that both sources of information have the exact same quotes, do you really care about that?  It just makes the process harder.

As QPW stated, Quicken does the # of shares compare at each download.  For the basis you have to make sure that you enter the correct total cost when the security is purchased.

Jim_Harman

splasher said:

I believe that there are only two important # for each security, basis and # of shares.  Trying to compare a security at Market Value (Q vs brokerage) requires that both sources of information have the exact same quotes, do you really care about that?  It just makes the process harder.

As QPW stated, Quicken does the # of shares compare at each download.  For the basis you have to make sure that you enter the correct total cost when the security is purchased.

Of course you need the purchase date of each tax lot also.

splasher

splasher said:

I believe that there are only two important # for each security, basis and # of shares.  Trying to compare a security at Market Value (Q vs brokerage) requires that both sources of information have the exact same quotes, do you really care about that?  It just makes the process harder.

As QPW stated, Quicken does the # of shares compare at each download.  For the basis you have to make sure that you enter the correct total cost when the security is purchased.

Agreed.  I was tunnel-visioned on reconciling.

q_lurker

splasher

splasher said:

I believe that there are only two important # for each security, basis and # of shares.  Trying to compare a security at Market Value (Q vs brokerage) requires that both sources of information have the exact same quotes, do you really care about that?  It just makes the process harder.

As QPW stated, Quicken does the # of shares compare at each download.  For the basis you have to make sure that you enter the correct total cost when the security is purchased.

But if I know my quantities are correct, then I look at quotes, the MV will only be wrong if the quote is wrong and there are generally less digits in quotes so they are easier to compare, at least for me.

mshiggins

splasher said:

I believe that there are only two important # for each security, basis and # of shares.  Trying to compare a security at Market Value (Q vs brokerage) requires that both sources of information have the exact same quotes, do you really care about that?  It just makes the process harder.

As QPW stated, Quicken does the # of shares compare at each download.  For the basis you have to make sure that you enter the correct total cost when the security is purchased.

The Portfolio can display market value, cost basis, and share balance. Sliced and diced any way you like it.

Jim_Harman

splasher said:

I believe that there are only two important # for each security, basis and # of shares.  Trying to compare a security at Market Value (Q vs brokerage) requires that both sources of information have the exact same quotes, do you really care about that?  It just makes the process harder.

As QPW stated, Quicken does the # of shares compare at each download.  For the basis you have to make sure that you enter the correct total cost when the security is purchased.

Those 100,000s of shares are hard to keep track of, eh?

BTW keeping round numbers of shares and not reinvesting distributions helps keep things simple and reduces round-off issues too.

mshiggins

splasher said:

I believe that there are only two important # for each security, basis and # of shares.  Trying to compare a security at Market Value (Q vs brokerage) requires that both sources of information have the exact same quotes, do you really care about that?  It just makes the process harder.

As QPW stated, Quicken does the # of shares compare at each download.  For the basis you have to make sure that you enter the correct total cost when the security is purchased.

There should not be any rounding errors if you enter the distribution reinvestments with the correct share amounts.

Jim_Harman

splasher said:

I believe that there are only two important # for each security, basis and # of shares.  Trying to compare a security at Market Value (Q vs brokerage) requires that both sources of information have the exact same quotes, do you really care about that?  It just makes the process harder.

As QPW stated, Quicken does the # of shares compare at each download.  For the basis you have to make sure that you enter the correct total cost when the security is purchased.

There should not be any rounding errors if you enter the distribution reinvestments with the correct share amounts.

Please explain that the T Rowe Price!

All my 401(k) transactions are downloaded and every few months there is a mismatch of .0013 shares or so, sometimes plus, sometimes minus. I have to go to the offending Reinvest transaction and adjust the share count by the right amount to make it balance. I suppose I could just ignore the difference if it is small, but I am picky.

And they call all the distributions ReinvInt rather than ReinvDiv, not that it matters in a tax deferred account.