Placeholder Investment Transactions and their impact on Income and Expense reports problematic

ciarmer

Unfortunately, this doesn't appear to be a solution for my particular issue.

I followed the excellent detailed instructions and the process started. I could see the progress on the screen, with holdings slowly being removed from the problem account. After about an hour, the transaction screen of the problem account, which had been showing new transfer transactions suddenly went blank. This is the same behavior I was getting when trying to add transactions to my original file about 10 days ago. I suspected that once this process was completed, I would not be able to access that account without a Quicken crash. But I let it run for a while longer. While I couldn't see the transfers happening, I could see total dollars in the account going down steadily so I knew it was still working.

After a bit more than two hours, I stopped the process (using the Windows Task Manager). When I opened the Quicken file and accessed the new file (containing the transferred securities), I found that it contained securities in alphabetical order from A through E and a couple of F's. That's after more than two hours.

Unfortunately when I clicked on the old account (which had what appeared to be a blank register during the process), Quicken tried to work for a while but then gave me the message that it needed to close because of an unexpected error (which is the same error I was getting when this problem started).

As mentioned, this is almost exactly the same behavior as I had when this problem started (which led to my original post - see link). It almost feels like this account (or file) has come close to reaching some limit beyond which the program cannot display the transactions. Originally, the "limit" was reached when a simple downloaded dividend transaction was entered and now, the limit was reached when an additional transfer transaction was added during the transfer shares process. Same behavior. IE - Blank register, then crash when trying to click on that account).

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7854668/my-transactions-will-not-display-without-triggering-a-crash-of-quicken#latest

Jim_Harman

I would not give up quite yet. If you stopped the transfer process by killing Quicken in the Task Manager, there is no telling what state your data file was in when you killed it.

It will take a loooooong time to complete this process, especially since you have 300 positions to move and it was running slowly when you started. Start over with a restored backup. Make a copy of the restored backup as described here
https://www.quicken.com/support/advanced-data-file-troubleshooting-correct-problems-quicken-windows

Because the copy process rebuilds the file, that sometimes fixes latent problems. Then repeat the new account and transfer process above, letting it run overnight. If the balances are still changing in the morning, let it run even longer. You don't have much to lose.

Or you can upgrade to QWin 2019 and try the Archive process on the copy of the restored backup. Since that is just moving transactions from one account to another, it SHOULD be faster and less disruptive.

ciarmer

I thought about this for a while and decided to upgrade. I'm now running Q 2019. I did go through the process of restoring a file from backup and then making a copy and also doing a validate including rebuilding of stock positions. So, I'm ready to go through the archive process. Anything else I should know before I move forward?

It is telling me there are 6,518 out of 16,188 transactions with closed positions.

That sounds like about 40% of the positions in this account.

Jim_Harman

The account name must be less than 22 characters long for the archive to work. Shorten it if necessary.

40% of the transactions, not 40% of the positions (holdings), will end up in the archive account. You should end up with about 9,670 transactions in the active account..

Once the archive is complete, you should be able to download transactions. Hopefully there will not be a gap of missing transactions between the archive date and the earliest downloaded transaction and thus no need for Placeholders to make up the difference.

 If there is a gap, you will have to enter the missing transactions manually.

ciarmer

Hi Jim.

The Archive process first went through a file validation and then immediately created the archive. It seemed the archive was created in a few seconds.
The one account has been split in two. Seemed to do what I had expected.
I then tried to download recent transactions and got error messages. But I'm looking at other posts from today and it seems there is a general problem with the downloading on Fidelity Accounts. I don't think it has anything to do with the archive process or the upgrade to Q 2019.

Once I am able to download transactions in time gap I'll be able to tell if I'm where I'd hoped to be. I'll keep you up to date.

Thanks so much. I still can't believe it took just a few seconds to create the archive.

Jim_Harman

Yes the archive process is really fast.

Good luck on completing the process!

ciarmer

Thank you so much for all of your patience and your assistance through this. I sincerely appreciate all of your time and your help.
Dom

ciarmer

Reporting Back on my experience. (Which seems very positive... Thanks again for your help with this).

Fidelity downloads were not working for a couple of days. Downloads finally started working a a couple of hours ago. I'm glad I had a couple of days to think about it. I ended up preparing a more recent file from my backups. I thought it would be better to only require downloading of about 15 days of activity rather than 60. I'm glad I did that.

After the downloads, there was a significant amount of unusual activity with Quicken alternatively giving me messages that it wasn't responding (even though my hard drive activity was significant). In addition, I got a few other odd messages including an unrequested restart of the program with an apology that stated that the program had closed and was now restarting. I also got a recurring message about Quicken looking for matching transactions. These messages included flashing of a blank screen a few times. Apparently, whatever happened was something that Quicken was able to overcome and I was left with a number of transactions to download. I backed up the file at that point (which led to me receiving a another couple of messages about Quicken looking for matching transactions) but in the end, it seemed to stabilize and I was able to begin accepting all of the downloaded transactions. I did this one at a time.

My account holdings and cash balance in the problem account are now correct! It looks like everything is in good shape.

Quite a lot of time and effort to get here but the result seems great.

I do have some questions but I'll start out with just one. This is a managed account (investment activity managed by Fidelity). Over time, there will be more securities which are no longer part of current holdings. When I perform another archive will I be able to archive the transactions to my current archive account or will I have an additional archive accounts for each archive process I implement?

ciarmer

Hi Jim - Now that I've got some real experience with the archive process (and I'm really happy with it) I do have some questions related specifically to archives. I thought it best to start a new Question. Wanted to let you know as I really value your opinion.

Here is the new post:

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7855422/some-questions-about-archiving-investment-transactions/p1?new=1