My portfolio does not show balances. Why?

Huskers

My portfolio does not show balances. Why?

jacobs

Could you clarify with a little more information?

First, are you using Quicken 2017 or Quicken 2019?

Second, you've clicked on one of your investment accounts, or one of the headings like Brokerage or Retirement or Investing in the left sidebar? And clicked on the Portfolio tab/button at the top of the main screen? 

What are your filters (beneath the graph) set to. You might have something like this:



And what columns do you have visible in this view? Typically, you'd want Market Value, and perhaps Cost Basis and Gain/Loss, like this:



When you say "Balances", are you referring to your market value, as shown here, or do you mean a cash balance in an account. A cash balance will be visible ithhe the Portfolio view if you Group by Security, or if you Group by Account and open the account by clicking the triangle to the left of fthe account name. The Cash Balance is also visible in the register if you click to switch from Portfolio view to Transactions -- but the latter is true only if you've selected a single account in the left sidebar; there is no cash balance if you've selected a group of accounts. 

If there's some other balance you're looking for, please explain further.

Huskers

Quicken 17
Market Value

Huskers

Quicken 2017, Portfolio tab, filters - portfolio value, unrealized gains, realized gains

jacobs

Okay, my screen shots above were from Quicken 2019; filters and columns look different in Quicken 2017.

(In Quicken 2019, this is renamed "Market Value".) You must be clicked on that tab that says Portfolio Value; it should appear gray, like this:

So with what you describe, do you not have a "Value"  column?


Is that not what you're looking for? If not, please explain further. 

Huskers

1) No
2) Yes

jacobs

Can you take a screen shot, obscuring anty data you want to keep private. I've illustrated the settings to make it show the Value column. Quicken 2017 does show the Value column, so there is something in your settings that are not set right for showing Value, but I can't guess at them without more information. 

Huskers

Here's the screen shot

jacobs

Okay, so your screen shot shows the Value column. You said that's what you were seeking. So I must be missing something -- what are you looking for that is missing?

Huskers

Jacob, sorry I didn't get back to you sooner. The issue is stock balance. My portfolio shows how many shares I have but under transactions it shows zero. I'm trying to update my records to show dividends and how that translates into shares I received. Thanks for your patience.

jacobs

When you receve a dividend, is the transaction type a Reinvest Dividend? That is, you received a dividend which was automatically reinvested to buy more shares, right.

Well, it turns out that other people have asked for a way to see the value of this reinvestment in their transactions. I've got good news and bad news for you! The good news is that the Quicken developers just added a new informational column they call Investment Amout to do exactly this: show the value of a reinvested dividend transaction. Here's a screen shot of two Reinvest Divident transactions which have no dollar amount and don't change the account balance, with the new Invest Amt colum showing the value of the divident reinvestment:



The bad news is that this is new in the version 5.12 release of Quicken 2019 -- and you're using Quicken 2017. In some cases, new features in the current program are later applied to Quicken 2017, but more often than not, they do not add new features like this to the old version of the program. so it's possible, if bnot likely, that you won't get this functionality until/unless you upgrade to the current Quicken.

Huskers

Okay, I bit the bullet. I see the invested amount but amount and balance still show zero...like your example.

jacobs

Well, the amount should be zero and the balance should be unchanged.

Think about what's happening with a reinvested dividend. Let's say your security has a price of $10 and declares a $200 dividend. It could be shown as two transactions: (1) a dividend of $200, which would have an Amount of $200 and raise your Balance to $200; followed by (2) a purchase of 20 shares @ $10 each, adding 20 shares at a cost of $200, so an Amount of -$200 and reducing the balance to zero. A reinvested dividend does these two steps in one transaction: it adds 20 shares and doesn't have an Amount or affect the Balance. So they added the "Invest Amt" column to show the $200 value of the dividend -- it's not necessary to show, since all that changes is the share balance, but users wanted to be able to see the value of these dividends.

Does that make sense?

Huskers

Yes it does.