Entering Brokerage Transactions by Hand

Steve29

I just converted a big Quicken 2007 Mac file to Q2019. It went okay with some glitches, but not anything major. But now when I enter a brokerage transaction (doing it by hand -- typing in the numbers -- sell or buy), the total number of shares in the portfolio view does not change. I've tried this in two accounts, and both have the same problem. Entering transactions in credit card accounts seems to work. 

One difference I can see -- in the transactions that were converted from Q2007, there's a link "Appears on your statement as <name of fund>". In the ones I've tried entering by hand there's no link. Otherwise they look just like the imported ones, that work correctly.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions -- 

smayer97

Sounds like you might be dealing with Placeholders. Take a look at this;

• What Are Placeholder Transactions in Quicken for Mac?

Steve29

I will check it out. Thanks. I found a couple of placeholder transactions when I imported from Q2007. In one case it made share totals incorrect -- so I deleted it. In another, the share total seems okay, so I left it alone. I will check and see if the transactions are changing when I do a buy or sell & I'll report back. For what it's worth, none of these accounts are yet connected to the bank electronically. Everything will be entered manually, for now, anyway.

Steve29

I created a random transaction as a test. No placeholder transaction was created and share totals updated correctly. So I deleted the test and the bad transactions and re-entered them. And now they work. I had tried the same thing with the Quicken chat support and it didn't work. So now I'm dumbfounded. I have no idea why it worked this time and didn't before. I can't see any difference in the transaction.

jacobs

If you previously had a placeholder transaction, it would have been forcing your share totals to stay constant, no matter what else you did. Once you removed the placeholder transaction, anything you add/change/delete in the account affects the number of shares and/or balance.

Steve29

Unfortunately, there weren't any placeholder transactions in the accounts affected. I did have them elsewhere (there are quite a few accounts). For seemingly no reason I was unable to make a transaction that changed totals. And then I was. For now it's working, but I don't see what I did differently.

Regarding those placeholders -- the ones that remain are for mutual funds I no longer own. Quicken (2007 or 2019) never had online access to my accounts, so I assume the placeholders were created only as a result of the import and conversion from 2007 to 2019. Since I no longer own those funds, I'm wondering whether I can't remove the placeholders. The one exception did apply to a fund I own and I had to remove it to make the share totals match between 2007 and 2019. So I'm thinking the others might be bogus, too. Any thoughts about that?

Thanks (and thanks for responding to my other question, as well.)