Downloads overwhelming - where to start

Steve308@

I've been using Q for almost 30 years, during which I've entered almost everything manually (downloads seemed to be more trouble than they were worth). Been using Q 2011 for the past 5 years or so. A couple years ago, my investment situation became a lot more complex, with dozens of individual equities and bonds. At that point I stopped entering the investment info, and just relied on brokerage statements for updates.

Now I've taken the plunge with Q 2019, and would like to download updates to the investment accounts. The question is how to proceed.

My first attempt resulted in dozens of popup dialog boxes titled "Was the security renamed?" These were entirely bizarre - asking, for instance, whether the existing name Microsoft should be matched with the new name Home Depot. No matter how I answer, the result is a mess of incomplete transactions, possibly because Q is not downloading back far enough to obtain the info.

Then there are more dozens of dialog boxes saying that Q needs more info on this transaction, and a wizard will guide me thru it. But when I click OK, no wizard appears.

So I'm left wondering how much info I'll need to enter manually in order to make this work. Or whether there's some other way to approach this. Any ideas? Thanks!

mshiggins

Steve, what financial institution are you having this issue with? How is your preference set for Downloaded Transactions - is the box checked for Automatically Add Downloaded Transactions to Investment Transaction Lists?

Steve308@

Financial Institution: Fidelity. Haven't wanted to automatically add transactions, thought it would be better to check them first. Maybe that's not a good idea?

Steve308@

Also tried setting up a new file and downloading from scratch, to see what would happen. Ended up with a couple hundred placeholder entries.

Steve308@

Just checking in to see if there are any ideas on how to approach this. Thanks!

Tom Young

At this point I expect you're not going to get any download that goes far enough "back in time" to fill in all the missing transactions.  The financial institution controls that and I have no idea what Fidelity's limit might be, but I'd expect "a couple of years" exceeds it.

The only foolproof method here is to sit down and enter all the missing transactions, making sure everything balances out perfectly with all the Fidelity statements for that time period.  If you understand exactly how far back Fidelity is feeding you transactions you should be able to only enter manual transactions up to that point and then ask for downloads, NOT allowing for automatic entry.  You want to know that each entry you accept is absolutely the correct entry.

You can still encounter problems if Fidelity is sending you erroneous information; sometimes Financial Institutions will send transactions that get using particular "actions" like "Add" and "Remove" that more or less get your balances correctly stated but don't properly reflect the "income and expense" aspects.

Then there's always the approach of simply forcing your balances to agree to Fidelity, doing a download where you delete every item in the Downloaded Transactions window, and then going forward from there.