How to Handle Investing Problem

ScottW

I have been a Quicken user for many years. My investment portfolio has become out of control with respect to Quicken. Can seem to be able to reconcile without making a bigger mess of it. I feel like I should start over but am concerned about losing the links between my checking and the investments etc. Any guidance is appreciated.

Jim_Harman

Are you entering transactions manually or downloading?

Are you concerned about accurate tracking of your cost basis and thus capital gains in Quicken?

Are you concerned about accurate tracking of your investment performance in Quicken?

If the answer to the last 2 questions is No and you only care about the account balances, the solution will be simpler.

What version of Quicken are you currently running?

ScottW

I had been entering them manually but would like to download them to automate the process a bit. I have an assortment of investments and at the end of the day I need to track the transfers between accounts and have an accurate account balance. Performance would be nice....I am using Quicken Premier 2019. I have quicken data that goes back probably 20 years. Don't want to lose the historical data.

Jim_Harman

One way to handle this would be to use the Add or Remove shares actions to make the number of shares of each security in each account match your statements.

If you do this Quicken will no longer have an accurate picture of your tax lots and cost basis, but you say your accounts are already messed up, so perhaps this is not an issue for you.

 Also if you have not done so already, go to Edit > Preferences > Investment transactions and make sure "Show hidden transactions" is checked. This will make any Placeholders in your accounts visible. If you want to clean up the accounts, resolving the Placeholders will be an important first step.

ScottW

I tried to update the share balance in the account under actions, but the popup says cash balance. Sounds like a bug. Is there another way?

Rocket J Squirrel

Adjust Share Balance works in QW2019. In any case, it's a bad idea because it will add a placeholder transaction to your account. Then you'd just have to resolve all placeholders anyway. Better not to add them in the first place. The Adjust Shares dialog has plenty of warnings which you should heed.

Just use Add/Remove Shares to get to the right number. Include the costs in the Add Shares transactions if you know them.

Rocket J Squirrel

Oh, now I see what you mean. Update Share Balance under the gear menu does indeed bring up the Update Cash Balance dialog. A bug indeed.

Jim_Harman

Starting in R20.15, the gear menu Update Share Balance is supposed to use Added/Removed to correct the share balance, and it does that for new QDF files. 

Apparently there is a bug that causes the Update Cash balance dialog to appear when you use it with older data files.

Rocket J Squirrel

Even more interesting... if you take an old data file and create a new brokerage account, Update Share Balance opens the correct dialog in that account. But it continues to open the Update Cash Balance dialog in pre-existing accounts.

Bug report submitted.