Consolidating Accounts

System

This discussion was created from comments split from: adjust share balance doesn't work.

DocDJ

I am using Quicken 2019 R18.15. I have been trying, unsuccessfully, to get quicken to AUTOMATICALLY make my balances in the Investing panel, to match my actual account balances. I do not care about any transaction details, so placeholders are fine. I tried Update (Adjust) Account Balances but that requires me to manually insert the # shares on every investment for that institution's holding account. I need this because I am moving several holdings from one Investment firm to another for consolidation, but want to see the results in Quicken.

Jim_Harman

@DocDJ
See my comments here:
https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7851577/register-holdings-do-not-agree-to-downloaded-holdings#latest

The approaches outlined there should make your balances agree within .001 shares. By design it does not bother you with smaller adjustments than that.

DocDJ

I tried all the bulleted steps and ran one-step update. My balances did NOT go to zero (in fact, they didn't change at all). And I could not find: Account details > Online services anywhere for any of my accounts or in a general menu. Where should that be?

Jim_Harman

[edited]

You don't want all your balances to go to zero, you want them to match your online balances, right?

Let's go back to your original problem. As I understand it, you have two accounts that you are consolidating into one by moving the securities from one account (call it account A) to the other (account B ). Both accounts are set up for downloading.

Perhaps you meant you want Account A's balances to go to zero and Account B to show the combined holdings. You don't care about the tax lots or cost basis of the securities you are moving. Do I have it right so far?

Note that if the tax lots and basis in Account A were correct before you started moving things around, it is easy to preserve them through this move. 

Jim_Harman

Also are there dozens of securities that you are moving, or just a few?

And are you moving everything from Account A to Account B or just some of the securities?

DocDJ

You have it right. Each account (the "A" accounts) I'm moving can have several securities. I am moving ALL those securities from each A to a single B. When I finish the move every A should show a zero balance and B should have the balance of all securities from all the A accounts. Since B will have all the actual transaction details, all accounting operations will be done from B. Note that no sales are being done. This is only a change in holding company for the securities. Quicken will then be updated for transactions at B (and any "A" companies that I did not merge.)

Jim_Harman

OK, that should be reasonably simple, here are the steps to follow:

• Back up your data file in case something goes wrong.
• Make sure the share balances and, to the extent it matters to you, the tax lots in each "A" account are correct as of the transfer date. Delete any transactions such as Xout, Remove, Sell, Placeholders, etc in the "A" accounts after the transfer date that were attempting to get rid of the securities that have moved.
• In the "B" account, delete any Xin, Add, Buy, or placeholder transactions that were attempting to add the transferred securities. 
• When the 2 previous steps are done, everything should be as it was before the transfers. Do not proceed until all the shares are showing where they were originally.
• Now go to each "A" account, click on Enter Transactions, and select "Shares transferred between accounts" 
• Enter the transfer date, select "All securities" and the "B" account as the transfer account, and click on Enter/Done
• This will create one Removed transaction for each security in the "A" account and one Added transaction in the B account for each tax lot of each security transferred. Be patient, this may take some time.
• Repeat the Shares Transferred for the other A accounts. When you are done, the share balances in each A account should be zero and all the transferred shares should be in the B account. The share counts in the B account should match the online balances.
• If there is a cash balance remaining in any of the A accounts, transfer it to the B account as well. If the B account automatically sweeps cash to a money market fund, enter a Buy transaction to purchase the money market fund.
• In each of the A accounts, click the gear at the top right and select Edit account details
• Select Online Services and Deactivate. This will prevent further downloads from these accounts.
• If you want, you can hide these accounts by clicking on Display options and selecting "Hide account name..."

Jim_Harman

I should add that after these moves the transaction history for the moved securities will remain in the old "A" accounts and the tax lots for the current holdings will move to the "B" account.

Note that any future changes you make to the A accounts will not be reflected in the B account. That is why it is important that the A account balances be correct before you enter the Shares moved

If you want to analyze performance for a period that spans the move date, you should include all the affected accounts.

DocDJ

Shouldn't there already be a "transferred" transaction of some kind for each "A" security that has been moved? And where can I find the "Online Services" menu item?

Jim_Harman

There is no native "Transferred" transaction for shares. That is what the Shares moved between accounts "Macro transaction" does. When you transfer shares, the receiving financial institution does not know what Quicken account they came from and generally just sends one "Added" and the tax basis is lost.

You have indicated that as is often the case, there is some problem with the downloaded transactions. The clean way to tell Quicken what happened is to delete the downloaded transactions and use the Shares transferred action instead. The alternative would be to enter or edit the Removed  and Added transactions for each security in each account manually but that will be way more manual effort than the approach I outlined above.

To get to Online Services, as I said above, click the gear at the top right of the account and select Edit account details. In the Account details dialog, select the Online Services tab. Click on Deactivate. This will prevent further downloads from these accounts.

If there is no gear at the top right of your transaction list it may be because you are using "Pop-up registers". Go to View and de-select "use Pop-up Registers" if it is selected. This is a Quicken bug IMO.

q_lurker

DocDJ said:

Shouldn't there already be a "transferred" transaction of some kind for each "A" security that has been moved?

Jim's answer to that point is correct.  To augment his comments. the "Removed Shares" transactions in the "A" accounts will include in the memo field that the shares were transferred to the "B" account.  

DocDJ

I went to the account details for one of the A accounts. Found "online Transactions". It showed a message that the account balance in Quicken did not match the institutions balance and showed a placeholder with a negative amount. I clicked on "create placeholder", which it did. The placeholder IMPLIED it was a subtraction to bring the account to zero, but looking at the account list in the navigation panel, it still does not say zero balance (see screenshot). I even tried a one-step, but that made no difference. So I deleted the placeholders and the balances in Quicken dropped significantly, but not to zero.

Considering the time it is taking (me ad YOU) to do this, would I be better off just deleting those A accounts from Quicken (remember, I don't care about the tax effects) and re-creating them, in case I want to use institution A again at some future time?

Jim_Harman

Please read the Help on deleting accounts. If you delete an account, it can cause problems with accounts that have transfers to or from the deleted account.

Deleting an account permanently removes that account's records from your file. Once you delete an account, there's no way to recover the account or the information about your transactions that it contained. In addition, Quicken deletes the account name from the Category field of all transactions that have transfers to the account. These transactions appear as uncategorized transactions in reports.

In most cases, we recommend that you hide or close an account instead.

Jim_Harman

The screenshot you posted does not show the "navigation panel" which I assume is what Quicken calls the Account Bar, usually at the left side of your screen.  Instead it shows the Securities Comparison Mismatch dialog. This is saying that the first security for example has 1133.555 shares in Quicken but 0 shares in real life.

I think if you click on Details for that security in this dialog and tell it to create a placeholder, it will make a placeholder that zeros out your holding for that security in that account on the placeholder date. Is that not what you are seeing?

To see what is going on, use the method described above to make sure that the placeholders are not hidden and make sure there are no placeholders for that security dated later than the one you are creating.

DocDJ

I'll do as suggested, re the placeholders and send a screenshot of the nav bar as well tomorrow. PS There are no pending transfers in or out of ANY of the A accounts, nor will there be any in the future. The records for those accounts were transferred with the securities to the B account.