Why does Quicken Deluxe 2019 for Windows occasionally dramatically misrepresent my investments?

DeaconMike

I have had this problem with older versions of Quicken. I have been using the latest version for about 6 months and it has been reporting perfectly until today. Please advise.

Jim_Harman

If an investment is incorrect it is either the share price or the share quantity. If you figure out which is wrong, you can track down the source of the error.

Sometimes issues can be caused by hidden Placeholders in an account. Unfortunately Quicken hides these by default.

Go to Edit > Preferences > Investing transactions and make sure "show hidden transactions" is checked to see these transactions.

volvogirl

Could be wrong stray price per shares?

Jim_Harman

To answer this question, you need to do a little investigating to see which securities and/or accounts are causing the discrepancies.

One way to do this is to look at an Investing > Portfolio view that includes all your securities and all your accounts. You can use the bullt-in "Recent Performance" view or customize one.

Next to Group by, choose Accounts

Adjust the As of: date to find a date when things look right, then a date when they are wrong. What is different? 

A common problem is that a money market fund or some other security posts a share price of zero and thus the value of that fund goes to zero. A few days later it may start showing a price of $1.00 again and things will be OK.

Let us know what you see and we can help straighten things out.

DeaconMike

Thanks for the detailed advice. When I followed your instructions, it compared the account in question from the last version of Quicken (2016) to the new version. I looked line by line and could not find the problem. I loaded the next most recent Quicken backup where the investment numbers were correct. I ran one step update again, and the numbers now agree with the source online. No clue what happened here.

This was a constant issue with Quicken 2016 and earlier, at least for me. It got to the point where i had 2 investments that were way off. I created two dummy accounts to correct for it. I hope I don't have to do that again.

Jim_Harman

If an investment is incorrect it is either the share price or the share quantity. If you figure out which is wrong, you can track down the source of the error.

Sometimes issues can be caused by hidden Placeholders in an account. Unfortunately Quicken hides these by default.

Go to Edit > Preferences > Investing transactions and make sure "show hidden transactions" is checked to see these transactions.

DeaconMike

Thanks again. I'm really impressed with your knowledge of Quicken. This item was checked. I'll work on this again. I was probably in too much of a hurry last night.