Correcting investment acct securities cost

Unknown

I have mulitple securities in my portfolio. My financial institution does not support transaction down load and update so I manually enter all transactions. Some of my cost values are not correct. How do I correct the cost values?

mshiggins

Roland, what Quicken year version and operating system are you currently using?



By security cost, do you mean cost basis?

Unknown

windows and 2019

Unknown

yes, cost basis

UKR

Are you talking about "How do I add Buy / Sell / etc. transactions to my investment account register?" or are you asking about "How do I manually update quote prices in Quicken?"

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Unknown

not new to Quicken, used it for many years.  The cost basis on some securities in one of my investment accounts is incorrect and I am looking for a way to adjust the cost basis.

mshiggins

Roland Hines said:

not new to Quicken, used it for many years.  The cost basis on some securities in one of my investment accounts is incorrect and I am looking for a way to adjust the cost basis.

How did you determine the cost basis is incorrect? Are you looking at individual lots or the combined lots for a security? Has there been any corporate actions for the security?

Tom Young

There isn't a simple "Cost Basis Correction" wizard that you can use.  If the cost basis of a security is incorrect and you've entered all transactions manually, then the (obvious) reason for the incorrect basis is that an entry or entries have been recorded incorrectly and the best fix for that (obviously) is find your error. 

Assuming the number of shares is correct I'd probably look at the "sells" first, as they are trickier to enter then the "buys" since you have to select the same lots to sell as the lots used by the broker.  Especially confounding when it comes to sells is the situation where you have a wash sale loss, a loss that you can't deduct currently but instead is attached to the "replacement shares".  Brokers don't show you the "behind the scenes" transactions as to where that wash loss gets attached to a lot or lots; it more or less happens "magically" and there's no straight-forward "transaction" you can enter into Quicken to make your Quicken lots line up with the broker's records. 

In my own file I have a few of these cost basis differences that relate to wash sale losses - usually with a fund that issues dividends monthly that are automatically reinvested - and I've decided I'll just live with the differences, differences that are fairly small, because the only straight-forward way of correcting these differences is to do a Remove of all the shares and then enter dozens and dozens of Adds to get all those lots aligned with the broker's reporting.  If that's what you face you may choose to take that course, too.

If you have access to the financial institution's detail of cost basis, monthly, quarterly or yearly, then comparing that history to your Quicken's detail of cost basis at least should allow you to spot the period when your two cost bases diverged and then focus on transactions in that period.