Why does the Holdings report only the shares bought this month and not the total # of shares?

Question

I was trying to enter a sale of part of a security and was told I only had 10.29 shares which was the number of shares purchased this month using reinvestment. If I look at the detail of that particular security I have over 5,000 shares. So I reviewed several other securities that reinvest their income and they are showing only the current  months number of shares purchased in a  reinvestment transaction on the holdings screen. However if you click on that security and look at the detail you will see all of the monthly share purchases using reinvestment of income and a totally different number of total shares held.
Thank you
Diana

dwilliamscore · Answer

You you bring up good points regarding errors when a security is not owned in the account, however I have used another software that is no longer available that gave errors when an activity was recorded and that security was not owned in that account, and yes I did run into a dividend being paid after the security had been sold. My work around was to change the activity date on the sale or the recording of the income. But at least I was alerted immediately that I did not own that security.

So in the case of my error, I would have liked to have had at least a soft error where I could have acknowledged that yes I know I don't own that security in this account and still entered the activity or stop and look and realize ahh I'm in the wrong account.

i wouldn't mind so much if the reconciliation of the accounts would also reconcile the # of shares I own. Which is another sore point I have with quicken.

q_lurker · Answer

"When entering income from a security and that security does not exist in that account I should get an error."

If you have recently sold a stock after the ex-dividend date, you will be collecting the dividend on a stock you do not own at the time of the dividend payment.  So what you are asking for as an error check may not be an error in all cases.

The real answer is that there is no data checking of that sense that does take place.  Perhaps the sale of more shares than you own falls into that grouping, but even for that, it is not hard to generate transactions that get to negative share balances without a cross-check.

dwilliamscore · Answer

I am embarrassed but I finally figured out my issue, I have 2 investment accounts with similar names and I discovered I had inadvertently entered some of my transactions into the wrong investment account and that I believe is why I wasn't seeing all of my entries. Which begs the question why does Quicken not error when I am entering an entry and I do not have that security in that account. When entering income from a security and that security does not exist in that account I should get an error.
Thank you for your response as it helped me look into my entries and that is how I discovered I had entered them into the wrong account.