Product issue: Quicken adding "fake" price for manually-priced securities (QM2007->QMac)

tmplee

This should be in the "known issues" section, but it looks like one can't put anything in that category. I and at least one other person have observed that when security prices for a security whose prices have been manually entered are converted from QM 2007 to 2019 (5.12.3) Quicken adds a price for the date the conversion is taking place, presumably after having tried to find it from the quote server and failing to do so. It appears that the new price entered is either the last price entered or something completely different. It doesn't seem to matter much whether the security has been assigned a notional (non-existent) ticker symbol or not, although if not very few of the prices get transferred over. In any case, this is not a desired behavior: if Quicken cannot get a quote from the quote server, it should not attempt to guess what price might be appropriate — suppose prices are only available once a quarter or even less frequently, and never on-line, the last price in the file for a security may be a long ways off from the next one that will be available (say, in a statement.)

Sherlock

From https://www.quicken.com/support/how-update-security-prices:

tmplee

@Sherlock that doesn't really answer my question. There is no price, manual or otherwise, for the date the conversion takes place for these kinds of securities. So why does Quicken make an entry for that date in the price history? I did an experiment. I added a price for the day before the entry it made on one of the securities. The one it had made up was not removed. For my converted Quicken file to be correct, I would have to go to EACH of the securities in question (I have about 30 of them) and remove the price Quicken has created for the date of conversion. BTW, I'm talking about Mac Quicken (2007 or 2019). The reference you gave was for Windows.

jacobs

@tmplee It's good that you've documented this issue here, but it's unfortunately not too likely for anyone on the Quicken development team to see it here. My suggestion is to copy and paste your report on Quicken's Help > Report a Problem screen. That's the only place where something like this might get to the developers. The challenge is that the communication is one-way -- you won't receive and acknowledgment or response -- and the triage person who checks out these reports has to be able to replicate the problem to pass it on to the developers. And I don't know how much attention they're paying to Quicken 2007 conversion issues any more -- but I think it's worth a try. Since I also tested this, I will also submit a post about my experience with this problem, and maybe a few reports will raise someone's eyebrow enough to take a look.

tmplee

@jacobs Thanks for the suggestion. I didn’t even know there was a specific place to report problems, as distinguished from “ideas”. I’ll tackle it when I’m back on my computer. As to the developers not paying much attention to migration from QM2007, I suspect there are a fair number of 2007 users who won’t know they are in trouble until they upgrade to Catalina and they’ll start complaining.

jacobs

Oh, I agree they should pay attention to this and other issues to help the remaining Quicken 2007 users make the leap forward! I was just saying I'm not sure it's a focus of the developers since so many 2007 users have already converted (for better or worse) and moved on, and the ever-shrinking community of Quicken 2007 users may not be where they're investing their time. I don't remember the last time I saw any update mention improvements/changes/fixes to the Quicken 2007 converter. 

smayer97

@tmplee I recommend you include a link to this thread in your report...

tmplee

@jacobs I just realized when you said Quickens Help > report a problem screen you probably meant in the app itself, not the website. I’m on my phone away from my computer so I won’t be able to verify that until later.

jacobs

Yes, sorry for not being clear – in the Quicken application.

Just a note of warning: the text field on that screen is quite small, so you should compose your message in any other text editor and then copy and paste it into that box. (This is a somewhat typical Quicken  not-quite-right tool: “we need all the details! Here’s a box that lets you type 50 words.“ )

tmplee

@jacobs I'm about to compose and send a problem report. To make this thread complete I've attached four screen shots of security price histories. They show the "before" and "after" (QM2007, 2019) list of the most recent prices for two securities that have only manually-entered prices. One security, "AN/VP Aggressive C14" I assigned (in QM2007) a phony ticker symbol (ANVPA-C14) to it, the other, "AN/THDNDL Emerging Mrkts" none.

tmplee

@jacobs Done. Too bad they don't at least acknowledge such submissions. Other apps, like LibreOffice, will even put you on a mailing list when you report a bug to keep you informed about what's happening with the report.

jacobs

@tmplee I suspect the problem is that they get many "bug" reports which aren't bugs at all. You can even see it on this forum, where there a new post scremaing "bug!" ever couple days, even though most turn out to be a user just not knowing how to use the software or recover from a minor problem. and some people who consider missing features to be bugs, or features that don't work the way they think it should to be bugs. So if they make it easy to report bugs, they need a lot of people doing triage to try to understand what was submitted -- often people aren't clear or detailed -- and then to relicate the problem, and then to write back to the users to clearly and patiently explain why the reported bug isn't a bug, or can't be understood or repeated. As much as I would love to see a more transprent and user-friendly process, I acknowledge that doing so would likely be a nightmare.