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Realign investment holds

David Palmer

I am using Quicken for Windows, 2019, R 17.6, build 27.1.17.6 on Windows 10. Years ago I grouped my retirement investments together in a single account which includes a number of mutual funds. I did the same for non-retirement investments, other than those held by a broker (which were placed in an account for that broker and are fine), which account holds both mutual funds and individual stocks not filed with a broker (inherited). Some time in the past, when upgrading Quicken, those two accounts were assigned to a financial institution, apparently at random, which has messed up all the transactions. I realize my method was not good and now need to separate out mutual funds and single stocks, along with their transactions. How do I do that?

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Comments

Jim_Harman

If you are entering the transactions for these securities manually, there should be no need to move them to different accounts, and moving them will not repair your messed up transactions. However you may want to move them so that they align with whatever statements you are receiving.

I would suggest that before moving anything, you go back through your existing transactions and fix any problems. We can help with that if you want to provide details on the types of problems you are seeing.

If you have not already, make sure you have set Quicken so that any Placeholder transactions are visible: Go to Edit > Preferences > Investment transactions and make sure "Show hidden transactions" is checked.

David Palmer

Thank you for your response. Transactions have been entered wherever possible via download. Only individual stocks, which do no have websites, are ordinarily entered manually. I have started entering older transactions (some go back to the mid-eighties) off the security report or original documentation.

The problems to which I have referred involve the transaction list that appears when I open one of the accounts. Every transaction shown has the same security name (one of the securities in the account) displayed. If I highlight a dividend transaction for any security and edit button, it always comes up with the same security name, which cannot be changed. If it is a transfer of funds to another account (XOUT), the edit box always comes up with the single security that cannot be changed. For a dividend entry, for example, the entry appears correctly in the security report for that security but not on the transaction log.

I did find the placeholder display turned off and have turned it on as per your recommendation.

Jim_Harman

OK,

When you go to the transaction list for an account and click on Holdings, are there multiple securities in the account or just the one that you are seeing in the Transaction List?

Is the transaction list is sorted by security? If so you will see a blue triangle next to Security at the top of the transaction list.

That would explain why all the transactions for one security are shown together. Click on the Date heading to sort it by date instead. The blue triangle should move next to Date when it is sorted by date. Click again and it will reverse the order.

David Palmer

The transaction list is sorted by date. (If I sort by security, I can quickly verify that only one security is shown :~) )

The holdings list shows all the holdings it should and the transaction history on the security detail view appears to show all transactions correctly.

I am beginning to wonder if my faulty organization method (since that is really what we are talking about here) may have revealed a weakness (Undocumented feature?) of either the current version or a data conversion during one the program updates. Of course, that does not help me recover from the problems I am having.

David Palmer

BTW, the share balance shown on all transactions in the two troublesome accounts is identical for all transactions and is a completely meaningless number. The transaction list for the real brokerage account is completely different than for the two problematic accounts.

Bob_L

What type account is it, i.e. brokerage or single mutual fund?

David Palmer

I am not sure how to tell what kind of account it is except by checking the 'edit account details' from the actions link. All three accounts (the real brokerage and the two accounts I use to contain holdings) are shown as brokerage accounts and not single mutual fund account.

David Palmer

BTW, these two accounts have not always had this problem. In the past, they worked as I thought they should and as the 'real' brokerage account ' did. I do not know when the behavior changed.

Jim_Harman

To summarize:

The problem accounts are brokerage accounts, not single mutual fund.

When you click on Holdings for these accounts, each shows the correct share balances for the various securities in that account.

In the transaction list for these accounts, only one security is shown and the list is the same regardless of which account you select.

Do I have that right? (It sounds really weird)

You said earlier

Transactions have been entered wherever possible via download. Only individual stocks, which do no have websites, are ordinarily entered manually.

Have you been downloading transactions from more than one website into these problem accounts?

What process are you using to do these downloads?

That might account for the problems you are seeing. Usually you would need to have a separate account n Quicken for each online account that you are downloading from.

Bob_L

Sounds like corruption to me. Have you tried File, File operations, Validate and repair, rebuild investing lots. Backup first

David Palmer

"To summarize:

The problem accounts are brokerage accounts, not single mutual fund. "

That is correct

"When you click on Holdings for these accounts, each shows the correct share balances for the various securities in that account. "

That is also true

"In the transaction list for these accounts, only one security is shown and the list is the same regardless of which account you select.

Do I have that right? (It sounds really weird)"

It is actually a little more weird that that. When I open the account, I do not choose a security to report. The transaction report shows (I think - it is hard to be sure) entries for every transaction posted to the account but they all list the same security name for every transaction recorded regardless of what security was selected when the transaction was written.

"You said earlier

Transactions have been entered wherever possible via download. Only individual stocks, which do no have websites, are ordinarily entered manually.

Have you been downloading transactions from more than one website into these problem accounts?

What process are you using to do these downloads?"

Where there are websites for the security, most of them have a export feature somewhere that allows me to download transactions I select, usually by date, in the format of a qfx file that will import to Quicken. I have been doing that way for years.

I appreciate the suggestion of Bob L. While the same thought had occurred to me, I had no idea of how to validate and repair a Quicken file. I will try it and report back what happens.

David Palmer

Backed up, validated, and rebuilt investing lots. No change. I will, of course, take a look at what validate found but none of the problems seem to have anything to do with the current struggle.

I was going to say something like "back to square one" except I don't think I have left square one yet.

David Palmer

Having gotten this far, perhaps I have better learned how to express my original question. Is it possible to move securities from one account to another, including moving all transactions for that security, without having to move the transactions one at a time?

Jim_Harman

Yes, you would use the Shares transferred between accounts action to do that. This will create one Remove transaction for each security you currently hold in the old account and one Add in the new account for each tax lot of each security. The transaction history remains in the old account.

We have not recommended that yet because it appears that there is something serious wrong with your data and moving your holdings around will probably not fix that.

If you want to try it, be sure to back up your data file first in case you do not like the result.