Quicken drops historical transactions??

Jim Hamren

About once a quarter I have the crazy experience that Quicken drops a couple of historical transactions. Each time it has been where I removed or sold shares leaving a zero balance in that particular account. It becomes immediately visible as my Net Worth shoots up with the value of a now-closed account. Any once else have this problem? Are the Quicken developers aware of this? It is a real pain to have to crawl through history and re-enter transactions more than a year in the past.

mshiggins

Are you using Q mobile or syncing your investment accounts to the Quicken cloud? 

Jim Hamren

Neither. BTW in this latest hiccup, the two lost transactions were replaced by two recent transactions to a different account and different security, one of which showed "wires completely crossed' as the price for the 2nd of the "replacement" transactions had the price for one of the transactions dropped.

I am using a desktop running Windows 7 Home Premium. Quicken is 2019, Version R19.55, latest build. However this is not a new problem, something very similar has happened several times in the past.

mshiggins

A few other things you may want to check that could contribute to strange transactions ...

Do you have your preferences set to automatically add investment transactions to the account register?

Do you use Accept All when processing your downloaded transactions?

Do you have your preferences set to detect and automatically add transfers?

Jim Hamren

Hello again. I do not automatically add investment transactions to the register. I have been using Accept All for the two accounts where I download transactions (though these accounts were not, as far as I could tell, involved in the hiccup described above). I do not detect and automatically add transfers.

For the most part I add transactions manually. My experience downloading transactions with Quicken was initially very poor; between the brokerage firms and Quicken simple transactions somehow became very complex and many many more records were downloaded than were needed. So I started entering manually from my statements and have not changed, except for two accounts where I have been successful downloading. As I said they did not appear to be involved in the hiccup.

q_lurker

Jim Hamren said:

...Any once else have this problem? Are the Quicken developers aware of this? 

I'd have to say No to both questions.  It is certainly not a common issue.  

In your case, I would be diligent about about 1) validating the file (conventional wisdom says on a copy of the file), and 2) keeping frequent backups at hand - like every time you close the file (program). 

With a good backup available,you should be able to immediately restore the backup when you see the issue develop.  That may lead you to better understand what is actually going on.  The irregular nature has me wondering about file corruption thus the validate suggestion.  Note that validation does seem less effective on investment accounts than other accounts.  That is to say, validation is less likely to find (and correct) something that is off-target with an investment.   

Jim Hamren

Thank you for the suggestions. I do periodically validate and I do back-up regularly. Each time this has happened I have either restored the back-up or sometimes just use the BU to identify the couple of transactions that need to be restored.

Let me give you a better idea of exactly what happens. I have a couple of accounts that have been closed over the years, Call them X1 and X2. What happened this time was that I entered a transaction from the current account, call it C. A simple dividend reinvestment. (Typically when I do this I copy and paste a similar transaction from the prior month and then change the date, and the amount if necessary.) What transpired apparently was that the last two transactions in one of the closed accounts were deleted and replaced by the single dividend reinvestment, twice. So X1(final) and X1(final-1) were replaced by C(last-correct) and C(last but priced at X1(Final)). Its like a wormhole opened and linked the two accounts in a strange and wonderful way. And as I said this same type of thing happens to me about once a quarter.

markus1957

I have seen weird behavior with copy/paste in an investment register. Can't provide details because I avoid using it and download all of my transactions. I've sensed that something is going on under the hood that causes Quicken to not recognize the paste as a truly new/unique transaction. Without the ability to view the database, only the developers could track down this type of phantom.

Jim_Harman

It sounds like the thing that you are doing that is unusual and may be the source of the problems you are seeing is the Copy/Paste.

To avoid copy/paste without having to create a new transaction for each dividend reinvestment, you might set up dividend reminders. These will appear at the bottom of your investing transaction list (register) as scheduled. After accepting each one, you would edit it to change it to a Reinvest, correct the amount, and enter the number of shares purchased. It should be about the same number of keystrokes as currently.

If you try that for a few months and the problem goes away, we will have evidence that the copy/paste is the problem. Keep in touch!

Jim Hamren

OK, thanks.