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reconcile using share balance instead of cash value in mac version (4 Legacy Votes)

kashyapa

I was using Quicken 2017 windows. Now moved to mac version. I used to reconcile using share balance and not cash value. How do I reconcile using share. balance and not cash value. Do not tell it is the only way.

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Reconcile

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(Untitled)

Status: Planned

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unknown

Reconcile Securities Along with Cash in Investment Accounts

It would be very helpful to be able to reconcile the securities within an investment account. Sometimes, I can end up with different security values because of an error on a transaction. But because it does not involve cash, I don't catch it. This would allow these to be caught relatively quickly.

John Burgess

I’ve also wanted this for a long time. anyone else think this is a good idea? Vote for it!

Lyn Buddenhagen

IMHO, Quicken is supposed to be a DIY application. The more we ask for, the more the app will cost.
I reconcile to my paper statements every so often, and go hunting for what I did wrong - or what did not get translated correctly in a download. To reconcile a security I look at transactions, filtered by the security (the magnifying glass/search area), and going to the Columns icon at the bottom, I choose Shares and Share Balance (usually getting rid of Amount and Cash Balance, since you can change back at any time). I do hope this helps you, Matt.

unknown

I would completely disagree with this being a DIY app. If that was the case, it would have user programmable capability. This app is meant to be easy to use with a lot of functionality built in.

Honestly, I don't understand how anyone could consider a proper reconciliation of an account that doesn't look at all possible elements of value in that account. This would mean that it includes securities for an investment account. You typically have very little, if any, cash in these accounts. Yet that is all you are looking at when reconciling. By not reviewing securities transactions and balances, you are turning the reconciliation process into a completely manual approach, which defeats the entire purpose of using finance software.

smayer97

I miss some transactions too, even after over 25 yrs of using Quicken, I have gotten good at eventually catching them...but I agree, this would be a very useful and appropriate feature.

Quicken_Tyka

Hello kashyapa,

Thank you for taking the time to come to the Community to post your question.

Unfortunately, the ability to reconcile using the share balance is unavailable at this time.

I have gone ahead and changed this thread to an Idea so that others may vote on this feature.

Thank you,
-Quicken Tyka

cjl06

Thanks for putting this to a vote. I have recently converted from windows to mac version and was really thrown by the "0" balance when reconciling. I have added my vote.

jacobs

I agree that being able to reconcile share balances could be useful.

I'm not sure what this would look like, though. Would there be a second column for reconciling shares? Would we reconcile an account twice, once for dollars and once for shares? Would it be a choice of cash or shares to reconcile?

smayer97

Yes still desired.

rhd99

Reconcile shares in Mac is definitely still wanted. It allows a quick check that the share balances by security in Quicken agree with the financial institution’s records for one’s account.

mekuehn

I used it on my PC while I waited for you to update the programs for the Mac. I purchased a Mac this year because of your improvements and moved my files over. I would really like that option with the Mac so the all versions are the same. I've been using your product for over 20 years and recommend it to friends and family.

FrostyDog

Just moved from quicken for windows to Mac. Disappointed that this feature, which is available in windows version, is not available in the Mac version. Please add ability to reconcile shares in investment accounts in addition to reconciling by cash balance.

JBS2021

Reconciling shares in investment accounts should be a mandatory function of Quicken for Mac. When dividends are automatically reinvested, the cash balance doesn't change but the number of security shares does change. An error in the reinvestment transaction or a missing reinvestment transaction would only affect the share balance and not the cash balance so it would never be detected unless the shares are reconciled. Please provide this functionality.

jacobs

@JBS2021 First, I agree fully that this should be added to Quicken Mac.

But until it is, I'll tell you how I reconcile my investment shares. At the end of each quarter (you could do it monthly if you wish), I review my brokerage statements versus Quicken. (I prefer to keep printed hard copies of my brokerage statements, but you can do this with a downloaded PDF if you're all-digital in that regard.)

Click on the account in the left sidebar
Click on Portfolio view
Set the filter to show "Portfolio Value" and "Group by Security"
Set the "Price and Holdings as of" date to the quarter-end date matching the brokerage statement

Now it is easy to go through the brokerage statement and compare it to the Shares column in Quicken for each security held, in each account. There's nothing to check off to mark my work as reconciled in Quicken, but since I know I do this every quarter and I have, in fact, reconciled my share balances in Quicken. This gives me complete confidence that my investment data is recorded correctly in Quicken.

Dan Twohig

I have been using Quicken PC for many years and looking to move to the MAC version which appears to have some excellent improvements. However, I can’t understand why anyone would consider reconciling the cash in an investment account without first reconciling the shares. Over the years being able to reconcile shares has caught problems that would have cascaded into massive if only cash was being reconciled. In my opinion, the absence of an ability to reconcile shares prohibits the product from being viable for investment accounting. Why would anyone pay so they can manually do an investment accounting requirement? I wonder if the Quicken manager for the MAC development uses the product for tracking investment accounts.

vdub

Need this feature. NOW! What’s holding it up?

MissMy2007

As others have said- need the feature, can't believe quicken for mac doesn't have it, it's on the windows version. I don't care about reconciling the dollar amount, I do care that my shares balance with the investment institution.

ccondrich

Cannot believe that this thread started in 2018 and that Q for Mac is still lacking this functionality. I recently migrated from Windows and am still finding investment functionality that is missing. Mac is easy to navigate but why can the two platforms not have the same functionality??

Chris_QPW

jacobs said:

I agree that being able to reconcile share balances could be useful.

I'm not sure what this would look like, though. Would there be a second column for reconciling shares? Would we reconcile an account twice, once for dollars and once for shares? Would it be a choice of cash or shares to reconcile?

I thought I would just clarify what "Reconcile Shares..." does in Quicken Windows.
When downloading investment data there is a "summary" part to it where the financial institution lists all your securities and number of shares and prices and the cash balance.

What "Reconcile Shares..." does is compare securities/number of shares to this "summary data" and puts up a dialog say that they compare or one that shows the differences. Note there is an option that allows this comparison to be done after every download. This is in fact what leads to adding placeholder or not (hopefully the user doesn't use them). I note from the Quicken Mac threads that at times it puts in placeholders. One would have to assume it is using same "summary data" to do this. As such, this really shouldn't be a really hard feature to put in.

Note that even though the cash balance is also in that summary, Quicken Windows doesn't use it for the cash reconcile, even though it has a checkbox for doing it, it is none functional in an investment account:
https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7923770/it-would-be-nice-if-reconcile-using-online-balance-was-actually-implemented

jacobs

@Chris_QPW And does the Quicken share reconciliation create a "reconciliation history" so you can go back and see what had been marked reconciled in the March 2022 or October 2019 reconciliation, if you want to?

In Quicken Mac, the Portfolio view can list each of your securities in an account, showing the number of shares, price, market value, etc. by security, plus cash, as of any date you select — today, end of last month, last quarter, or any date you enter. So this sounds like it has similar data as the "summary" screen you're describing in Quicken Windows.

What Quicken Mac doesn't have is a recorded history of reconciliations for shares of investments, showing each individual transaction included in that reconciliation, as it does for investment cash and all banking-type accounts. for someone who does a lot of trading and has many transactions in a month, and who might have transactions dated on the last day of a mo nth but not posted until a few days later, I can see there might be a benefit to marking off individual transactions in a monthly reconciliation, in order to have a history of what existed as of each month- or quarter-end.

But if the Quicken Windows share reconciliation is only to share totals, not transactions posted, as of a certain date, that doesn't sound like a real transaction reconciliation, and it seems to me one can already see the monthly summary value as of any past date in the Quicken Mac Portfolio.

Chris_QPW

@jacobs Quicken Windows doesn’t have a reconcile history for either investment accounts or non-investment accounts. Quicken Mac is superior in this since they have a reconcile history for non-investment accounts.

Frankly for most of the time I have ever used Quicken Windows I reconciled the share in exactly the same way that you deceived, go to the investment tab/portfolio view and select a date and grouped by accounts (securities are separated in this sorting).

I should have also pointed out the main weaknesses of “Reconcile Shares…”. First off, the only date you can reconcile to is the current one, or more precisely the date of the last download/date in the “summary data” that was downloaded.

Not only does that mean it is probably useless to people reconciling to a statement, there isn’t anything that guarantees the data is up to date/accurate/consistent. For instance, in Vanguard if I had a buy/sell on a given date the transaction would be downloaded that day by the end of the day, but the “summary data” wasn’t usually updated until late at night. This one of the main reasons why some people would get placeholders suggested when in fact their transaction data in Quicken was fine.

The Reconcile Shares and the ability to run it automatically is a nice feature, but it far from a critical one.

schmatt

I would like the ability to reconcile investments, not just cash, in my investment accounts.

I've always been confused as to why your investments (stocks, mutual funds, etc.) are not reconciled. It makes it very difficult to verify that all of the transactions are correct. You have to manually check all of this. If you find an issue, it's a very manual process to find the error.

Quicken Kristina

Hello @schmatt,

Thank you for reaching out to the Community with your request.

I went ahead and merged your Idea to this active Idea thread regarding this topic.

Ideas are reviewed by our Development and Product teams to see what features people would like to have available in the future. Please, be sure to add your own vote as well by clicking the up arrow.

Thank you.

Dan1701

Has anything been done on this? I would really love to see this feature. My investment account is the only one I can't reconcile, and it would be really nice to be able to do that.

ScottS

I to am struggling with this. I have an investment account that doesn't support Quicken download, so I have in the past manually entered transactions. Unfortunately I am 1.5 years behind on that because it became so onerous. And now i have begun taking RMDs from that account so that instead of the 5 or so transactions every quarter there are 5 security sell transactions, 2 taxes paid transaction, and a send money elsewhere transaction EVERY MONTH.

There is no way I can keep this up manually. If Quicken for MAC can't support manually adjusting share quantities for individual securities by simply entering the new shares value, then it is worthless for tracking this investment account.

Seems that there are enough folks having this problem that should get somebody at Quicken cracking at getting it solved.

ScottS

Seems that there are enough folks having this problem that should get somebody at Quicken cracking at getting it solved.

jacobs

@ScottS If I understand you correctly, you just want to adjust your Quicken investment account to reflect your holdings in the real-world account, without tracking dividends and gains/losses. I would think you could do this with an entry to Add Shares or Remove Shares for each security oon a monthly or quarterly basis. To do so, you'd look at your brokerage statement (whether you get one in the mail or log onto the brokerage site to view or download it on screen), see how many shares you have of Security A, open the Mac calculator, subtract the number of shares Quicken shows as of the statement date, and enter an Add or Remove Shares transaction for the difference. Then switch back to the Portfolio screen to verify that Quicken shows the same number of shares and market value as your brokerage statement. This is the same as having a reconcile procedure which would allow you to create an adjusting transaction, except here you need to calculate the difference manually, so it might add a minute (per security) to do the subtraction and enter the transaction.

Of course, this won't get you accurate information in Quicken about your taxable income from the RMD and your withholding tax deposits unless you enter them in a transaction in your non-retirement account which receives the proceeds of the RMD withdrawal.

In terms of reducing the amount of manual entry you do in Quicken, you might consider making your RMD withdrawals quarterly instead of monthly, which would cut the number of transactions by two thirds. Or: for the transactions in the "receiving" account (e.g. if your RMD goes into your checking account), you can make this a scheduled monthly transaction, complete with splits for the tax deposit and a hack to count the RMD as taxable income, so you don't have to enter that transaction each month.

For what it's worth, I enter all my investment accounts manually. I do record every transaction for reinvested dividends, gains, purchases and sales manually. It takes a little time either monthly or quarterly, but I don't find it onerous. Obviously, the viability of doing this depends on how many transactions each of us has; I have about 20 transactions per month on average. If you want to try entering the transactions to see how long it would actually take you, I'd first get your account and holding balances correct as of June 30 (with adjustment entries as described above), and then try entering the transactions for July when you get your statement; you might be surprised that it takes less time than you'd think.

Finally, yes, Quicken should provide more tools to help users with investment accounts, and particularly with retirement accounts. I find the lack of a way to easily record an RMD as a taxable income transaction a particularly glaring omission (see my post here requesting they address this, and add your vote at the top of that page).

Chris_QPW

Does Quicken Mac have the "Simple" investment mode? This is a new feature in Quicken Windows, and I thought it was put into Quicken Mac too. What it does is instead of downloading transactions it just looks at the summary information that is provided with the normal investment download (the same information that Quicken Windows' "Reconcile Shares" uses to determine if what Quicken has is the same as the financial institution, and if not recommend a placeholder {which you should never allow, correct transactions instead}). And with that summary information Simple investment mode will add add/remove shares and cash balance transactions to bring the number of shares and cash into alignment with that summary. It doesn't work for all financial institutions/account types (known not work right with Fidelity/401K accounts), but for the ones it does work right with if all the person wants is to have the right amount of shares/cash shown, that is what it does. Which tends to be fine for a lot of people in retirement accounts where they don't care able the cost basis.

jacobs

@Chris_QPW Yes, Quicken Mac has the option of Simple investment mode. I didn't mention it in my reply to @ScottS above because he indicated his investment account "doesn't support Quicken download". If it supported Simple investing without transaction downloads, he'd already have arrived at this solution, so my assumption was that it was a brokerage which doesn't have connectivity with Quicken — which may or may not be a correct assumption. 😉

Chris_QPW

No, my mistake, I didn’t see that he said that.