transactions not registering in portfolio view (Q Mac)

James Burke

Reinvestment transaction from 12/28/2017 onward are posting as Transactions but do NOT show in Portfolio view as additions to total share count and don't show as line items under the security in Portfolio view.
Quicken Deluxe 2019 Version 5.9.2 (Build 59.25153.100) on macOS 10.13.6

James Burke

James Burke

jschaffe

I'm having the same problem in Version 5.11.0 (Build 511.25626.100), macOS 10.14.3.

I have a brokerage account where recent downloaded reinvestment and buy/sell transactions appear in the register but are not reflected at all in the portfolio view.  In the past, I found I could edit the lots on a sale, but not only would that not help the other transactions, it isn't working this time.

jschaffe

BTW, I have a couple of Remove Shares transactions, but for other securities I no longer hold.  Deleting them makes the securities reappear in my portfolio, so I can't do it, and it didn't fix the offending security anyway.

The bottom line is that NO downloaded transactions are reflected in the portfolio of at least two of my accounts at all, even though they appear in the register. I can fix Sell transactions (I misspoke above) by using the Specify Lots work around, but none of the others.  

jschaffe

OK, after struggling with it for a while, I started a chat with Quicken Support.  I'm attaching a PDF of the conversation, but the answer seems to be there's nothing I can do about it except start a new file, losing years of history.  And get this, I'n not supposed to have more than 3 years of history in an account!!!   Am I the only person who would find this strange?

jacobs

@jschaffe No, you're not the only one; that all sounds ridiculous to me. Certainly many of us have many more than three years of history; many have close to three decades. I've asked one of the moderators here to look into this tomorrow.

Meanwhile, just to cover the bases, have you checked each of your accounts to make sure there is no placeholder transaction (typically at the beginning of the account)? Placeholder transactions are the most frequent cause of transactions that are visible but having mo impact on an account balance.

Quicken Sarah

jschaffe said:

OK, after struggling with it for a while, I started a chat with Quicken Support.  I'm attaching a PDF of the conversation, but the answer seems to be there's nothing I can do about it except start a new file, losing years of history.  And get this, I'n not supposed to have more than 3 years of history in an account!!!   Am I the only person who would find this strange?

Hello @jschaffe

Thank you for taking the time to report this issue, although I'm sorry to hear of the negative experience you had with one of our Support Agents.

I would like to look into this matter a little further, but unfortunately was not able to locate the case details for the chat.  Please send me a PM with the chat transcript PDF or if you happen to have it, the case number from Support.

Thank you,

Sarah

jschaffe

jacobs said:

@jschaffe No, you're not the only one; that all sounds ridiculous to me. Certainly many of us have many more than three years of history; many have close to three decades. I've asked one of the moderators here to look into this tomorrow.

Meanwhile, just to cover the bases, have you checked each of your accounts to make sure there is no placeholder transaction (typically at the beginning of the account)? Placeholder transactions are the most frequent cause of transactions that are visible but having mo impact on an account balance.

One of my two accounts has two placeholders, but for funds I no longer hold.  If I delete them, small share amounts in each fund appear in my portfolio.  There are no placeholders at all the other account with the same financial institution.  Both accounts experienced the problem of being unable to reflect new downloaded transactions properly.

jschaffe

BTW, In the end, I disconnected these two accounts from the financial institution, deleted the transactions that weren't properly reflected, and reentered them manually,  Finally I compared the portfolio view against the institution's Web site and made sure the current share values were exactly correct.

jacobs

@jschaffe Glad you figured out a solution. The placeholders were going to prevent things from working; it didn't matter that you no longer hold those securities. Sometimes if there's a tiny fraction of a share Quicken thinks you still have, and you need to do a Remove Share transaction to truly zero it out (to the full 6 decimal places).

You didn't respond to the part about your interaction with Quicken Support. If what you wrote above truly occurred, I strongly encourage you to respond to Quicken Sarah with the transcript you said you have of your interaction so she can check it out and make sure the support agent who gave you incredibly bad, wrong instructions gets some remedial education. Please help this from happening to some other Quicken user in the future. Thanks.

jschaffe

I’ll see if I can find where the error that the placeholders are correcting and fix the data. I have occasionally found dropped decimal places in transactions migrated from Quicken 2007. However, in the second Vanguard account, with a different logon, there were no place holders and the exact same failure to change share balances occurred. 

I have have sent a message to Quicken Sarah, so she may get back to me to confirm. 

jschaffe

BTW, I was unable to print the chat to paper or PDF from Safari; it generated a thin box at the top of a mostly blank single page with a scroll bar, not useful.  To generate the PDF, I selected all the text in the window, copied it and pasted it into a word document.  Then I had to shrink all the graphics to 10% of the original size, locate each of my parts of the chat, and change the font from white to blue, and right justify it for proper chat readability.  Then I saved it as a PDF.  Not for the fainthearted!

I mentioned this to Quicken Saah, and I hope the Quicken Web team will see if there could be a better way to print and print/save support chats to PDF in Safari on a Mac.

In the meantime, other folks might find this procedure helpful. 

jschaffe

I also noticed in the mobile format that the pdf I attached doesn’t appear above in the post where I attached it. Is this a bug, or might the moderators have removed it?

jacobs

I'm sure Quicken uses some third-party software for their chats; it always frustrates me when web pages on certain sites simply don't print correctly.

Barry Gilbert

I discovered this long sequence of comments regarding stock transactions not posting correctly in  the portfolio view. I also have added a request for a repair of this bug.  This discussion of "placeholder transactions" completely misses the point.  This is a very serious bug, which simply needs to be repaired so that users can be assured that the Quicken-Mac software is doing what it should, without struggling with work-arounds.  This was never a problem in Q2007Mac, which I am still forced to use because of this Q2019Mac error.  Barry Gilbert

jacobs

Barry, I’m not quite sure what bug you’re referring to. In all the cases above, it seems that a placeholder or transaction without a basis was the cause of the users’ problems, and those problems were all resolved. While I think Quicken could and should do a better job of alerting users to these conditions and guiding users how to update the transactions, there’s not really a bug there. So I’m not sure if that’s what you’re dealing with, or if you’re referring to something else which may indeed be a bug.

jschaffe

Er, sorry @jacobs, but my problem was NOT resolved.  I had to disconnect Quicken from my financial institutions and am back to entering my transactions by hand!  This will be resolved when I can connect back to my institutions and transactions are centered into my register automatically and correctly!

enterfornone

I've read this and some other (closed) discussions on this topic in the forum and have to agree with @jschaffe.
First - STOP pointing EVERY discussion towards these placeholder transactions. The bug is not about them.
I have NO placeholder transactions. I don't even download online transactions, as Quicken refuse to recognize that brokers and exchanges exist outside the US and Canada. I download a qfx file from Interactive Brokers and import it. On a given day I have 3 transactions on LSEX - for CSPX, IWDA, and TIP5. The one for TIP5 is reflected in the portfolio, the other two are not. Therefore the portfolio is off.
If I delete the imported (and not visible in the portfolio) transaction from the list and recreate it manually, the portfolio gets even more messed up - some of the existing transactions disappear and the portfolio gets even worse.
Now - get this. If I create and delete a manual (duplicate of the downloaded) transaction and leave the imported one (which was missing from the portfolio) - voila! - the transactions magically get correct in the portfolio for that security.

Therefore - the portfolio view has bugs, being generated from the transaction list.(Rant Redacted)

smayer97

enterfornone said:

... I don't even download online transactions, as Quicken refuse to recognize that brokers and exchanges exist outside the US and Canada. I download a qfx file...

I'm not addressing the placeholder issue nor the bug that may exist. Instead I just to correct a misconception... downloading a QFX file is downloading data from an FI/Bank (aka Web Connect). It is also part of online connectivity functionality of Quicken. 

Barry Gilbert

I concur with enterfornone's comments.  This bug is NOT about Placeholder Transactions.  I don't use them, and never have.  Likewise, I don't download any transactions from my brokerage; I hand-enter every transaction, and have for 20 years, so many of the comments regarding Placeholders are irrelevant.  This bug is a straightforward one:  stock buys or sells inserted (completely manually) into the Transactions view do not appear reliably in the Portfolio view; sometimes they do, but mostly they do not.  NOTE: This thread has been ongoing since James Burke reported it on January 9.  This comment is my second or third regarding this topic.  Watching this thread grow longer and longer without resolution, on April 27 I mailed a physical letter to Eric Dunn, CEO of Quicken Inc., asking that this bug, which is fatal for active investors such as I am, be corrected soonest.  So far, no response.  Moderators: are you out there?  Are you passing these types of desperate queries on to the software maintenance staff?  
BKG

jschaffe

Perhaps there is one bug that affects both direct downloads AND manually entered buys and sells.  I personally have had to give up downloading from my two most active institutions, but have not directly experiences issues with manually entered transactions. (Redacted)

jacobs

@Barry Gilbert Have you ever contact Quicken Support by phone? The reason I ask is that they can do a screen share to see what you are seeing, and if they can verify that what you are seeing appears to be a bona fide bug, they can escalate it to the product development team. I don't say that to question the validity of what you've reported, but there's a process. There are hundreds of people who post on this site complaining about bugs, and it turns out that most of them are user setup or operation errors/misunderstandings rather than bugs. But those which are verifiable can be reported and documented internally at Quicken. To answer your question: no the moderators on this site don't pass on everything claimed by a user to be a bug; they refer them to Quicken Support to test and document, and if it turns out to be a reproducible problem, pass it on to the developers.

Barry Gilbert

Jacobs, Yes, I have called Quicken Support by phone, twice, regarding this bug.  I explained it to both people that I spoke with, and neither seemed aware of it, nor could they help.  Neither of them suggested a screen share, which would not work anyway, because our computers are behind a very stiff firewall; doubt that I could find a way to let them in.  Alternate suggestion: does anyone who works at Quicken have a stock portfolio?  If so, they could do manually what I did: try buying or selling a stock, even only in test (no need to actually sell or buy anything through their brokerage account, since the problem shows up when transactions are entered manually, not downloaded from the brokerage's web site), and they would see that "trades" in the transactions view mostly do not appear in the portfolio view.  This is not a difficult bug to reproduce "in a laboratory setting"; it's pretty obvious.

jschaffe

I also contacted Quicken Support about my downloaded transactions not being reflected in portfolio view.

jacobs

Barry Gilbert said:

Alternate suggestion: does anyone who works at Quicken have a stock portfolio?  If so, they could do manually what I did: try buying or selling a stock, even only in test (no need to actually sell or buy anything through their brokerage account, since the problem shows up when transactions are entered manually, not downloaded from the brokerage's web site), and they would see that "trades" in the transactions view mostly do not appear in the portfolio view.  This is not a difficult bug to reproduce "in a laboratory setting"; it's pretty obvious.

@Barry Gilbert I disagree that it's pretty obvious. I use Quicken the way you do (manual entry), and I haven't observed this problem. It's not an issue that's been widely complained about, so I infer that many Quicken Mac users don't experience this problem. I'm not saying there isn't a problem -- just that it certainly isn't consistent or widespread. And the problem with getting sporadic bugs solved is getting the developers to be aware of it and to find a way to reproduce it, which can lead to fixing it.

So herein lies the problem: if Quicken Support doesn't document a problem and pass it upstream to the developers, it's likely it's just not on anyone's radar. We don't know that for sure; it's certainly possible there is a bug they're aware of and haven't fixed yet -- but the odds are otherwise.

If a user can figure out what circumstances cause this to happen, ideally simplifying it down to someone one could do creating a blank new files and entering a couple transactions -- then it can be reported as a bug (via Report a Problem), a Quicken team member would reproduce the steps and verify the problem, and it woulds be coded into their bug tracking system for investigation and repair. Alternatively, you could use Report a Problem and upload a sanitized version of your data file, and point out specific transactions not reflected in the portfolio, or how to reliably make this occur, and that could also be enough to get them to verify and document the issue as a bug.

Should it be the job of us end-users to troubleshoot and diagnose issues like this? No, of course not. But unfortunately, there's really no other way to get the developers to look into it. I'd guess that 95+% of the posts on this forum which complain "there's a bug!" turn out not to be bugs, and that's why Quicken doesn't have their developers spending considerable time sifting through all the posts on this forum... and that's why your report here is likely not to gain traction unless we can find a way to inject it into the developers' bug database. I know it's frustrating, and I don't know if you have the time or inclination to try to pursue it further. If so, what I'd suggest is creating a new test file, create one account and one or two securities, and try to see if you can replicate the problem in such a simple setting; if you can, post what you did here and let someone else verify that you're found a reproducible bug -- and then there's ammo for reporting it to Quicken.

Barry Gilbert

Jacobs, while I was driving to work this AM, I came up with almost exactly the suggestion that you give above.  Would it work and be helpful if I created some buy/sell transactions in the Transactions view, then do a screen grab of those transactions; then do a screen grab of the Portfolio view, to show that some or all of the just-entered transactions do *not* appear in the Portfolio view?  I would be willing to try that (probably not until this coming weekend); but where would I send the screen grabs, and to whom?    

And note that at 10:11 AM today (May 13) jschaffe just commented that he also has called Quicken Support to report the same problem.  It's not just me.........

Please advise............
BKG

jacobs

Barry, I'm just a fellow user, so I can't give you a guaranteed course to getting this resolved -- I'm just giving you the path I think gives the greatest chance of success.

A video screen capture can be helpful, but from things I've seen, what they value most is step-by-step instructions how to replicate a bug. (A couple times I sent videos as a beta tester and was told they couldn't open the file, which was annoying.) Here's the trick with bug reporting: once you can make the bug appear, keep trying again with a new file to cut it to the simplest sequence you can that shows the bug.

(As for jschaffe, it could be the same thing or it could be something different, since he's downloading transactions and you're entering them manually.  Your approach is, fortunately, easier to write directions to reproduce if you can find what causes it; it's often hard for people who are downloading transactions to come up with reproducible methods for developers to test.)

jschaffe

I was certainly able to see the issue whenever transactions were available to actually download. But of course it’s NOT easy to create a transaction just for testing with no investment impact. I’m hopeful that the defect occurs when transactions, either manually entered or downloaded, are ready to be updated to the portfolio view. That might be the whole problem however the transactions are created. But I have to say that I’m not noticing failures since I disconnected from the financial institution and resumed entering transactions manually. 

jacobs

Anyone doing testing like this is certainly advised to use a duplicate copy of your data file, or a new test file started from scratch, just in case something goes wrong or if becomes hard to undo your way back to where you started.

@jschaffe I'm not sure what you mean by "transactions ready to be updated to the portfolio view." Transactions entered manually should simply appear if you immediately switch to the portfolio view. (And in my limited testing, they do.)

Barry Gilbert

I will try this coming weekend to do as you suggest, including explaining how to produce the error.  Where do I send my results, including the step-by-step instructions (I'll create a Microsoft Word file)?
BKG