Reinvest Dividend Does Not Update Share Balance

jetucker98

Downloaded Reinvest Dividend transactions from TD Ameritrade do not update the share balance for that security. There are several posts with a related problem but no answer that solves it for me.

Before someone suggests the problem is placeholder transactions, let me clarify that I've followed those suggestions and there are no placeholder transactions in the account. I've double-checked in various ways.

It seems this ONLY affects Reinvest Dividend transactions for me. Buy and Sell transactions seem to be okay (as far as I can tell).

Also, if I edit an amount in the transaction, this clears the problem and the share balance then updates. For example, I can add a $1 commission, save it, and the balance updates. I then re-edit, remove the $1 commission, and the share balance remains updated.

Secondly, I can duplicate the transaction and the share balance updates for BOTH transactions (thus the share balance is too high because it includes the shares of both transactions). If I delete the duplicate transaction, the remaining original transaction reverts to not updating the share balance and the balance is thus too low. On the other hand, if I delete the original transaction instead, the duplicate transaction retains the (now adjusted and correct) share balance.

I am running Banktivity in parallel with Quicken and it does not have this issue. Both of them are downloading via OFX/QFX. Banktivity, however, shows these transactions as two parts. A Income (dividend) transaction depositing cash and a separate Buy transaction withdrawing cash. I assume that's actually how TD Ameritrade is providing the data; why does Quicken then combine them into one transaction and fail to update the share balance in the process?

I have a screenshot to show this in Quicken if I can post it but at the moment I don't see a way to do that.

jetucker98

Some additional info:

Quicken for Mac Version 5.12.5 (Build 512.29294.100) (subscription)
macOS 10.15 (19A602) (but this happened the same way on 10.14)

jetucker98

Apparently I have to make some minimum number of posts before I can add an image and none of my posts from the "old days" of Intuit are migrated here.

jetucker98

Attached is the screenshot of one of the accounts with this problem. (I hope)

lhossus

jetucker98 said:

Downloaded Reinvest Dividend transactions from TD Ameritrade do not update the share balance for that security. 

Have you switched to the Portfolio view and checked the Share Balance there?

I ask because this may just be a missing display of the new share balance in the transaction register, rather than a failure to update the share balance in the database.

Also, what happens if you add an additional BUY or SELL of say 1 share for one of these securities, dated after these transactions? Does the Share Balance value seem correct? Does the Share Balance appear for all the transactions where it is missing?

In any case, you should go to Quicken's Help menu and select Report a Problem.

jetucker98

Thanks for the reply. Yes, the portfolio view balance is wrong. That's what caused me to dig into this. I happened to be comparing balances in Banktivity and Quicken with each other and with the TD Ameritrade balance and saw the discrepancy.

Also, adding a transaction for the same security after a problem one does cause the problem one to update. And it remains updated after deleting the manually added one.

Interestingly, duplicating a transaction just now and then deleting the duplicate causes the original one to remain updated. It did not stay updated in my first test a couple of days ago. My first test was with the most recent one in the register. Today it was with one prior to a couple that got updated through my test above. I don't know if or why that would matter.

lhossus

Be sure to use Quicken's Help menu and select Report a Problem.

You could reference this discussion in your problem report, but be sure to summarize the problem there before submitting.

Some things to try

• Select another account, or All Transactions. Then select the TD Ameritrade account.
• Enable the column Invest Amt
• Reboot your computer.

jetucker98

I just got off a long support chat. Reasonably pleasant experience compared to the old Intuit days.

We created a new account linked to this same FI account. It downloaded and adjusted balances with no problem. But of course it doesn't get 5 years of transactions, so not a useful solution.

The rep also suggested creating new accounts and deactivating the current ones, keeping them as archives. Also not really a useful solution. Reporting would be very "messy" at best if I did this (having two separate Quicken accounts that represent different parts of one real account).

And it's apparently not possible to copy/paste or to export/import these transactions (or the entire Quicken file, for that matter). Apparently switching to Quicken 2019 is a one-way street; no way to export everything to anything.

We agreed there's some kind of damage to the account data in my Quicken file. But there's nothing visibly wrong, so I don't have a way of fixing it.

We disagreed that it was a Quicken problem. But Quicken is allowing some kind of problem in the data to break a very common, important feature. How the damage got there isn't the point; it may not have been caused by Quicken, but it shouldn't silently cause other breakage.

I've worked in development; that kind of thing should not happen; they simply are not performing adequate data checks somewhere around this code and/or not alerting to a data problem.

If this continues, I'll have to stick with Banktivity at the end of my current Quicken subscription even though Quicken is otherwise more useful.

jacobs

What if you disconnected your current account from the financial institution, created a new account in your Quicken file, then used the recently added feature to move all your holdings from the old account to the new account, and then re-set up the new account to download from the financial institution? If there's something in Quicken's internal data about that account that's mucked up, this seems like it would solve it. (Of course, if the problem is in Quicken's servers and not local, this will have no effect.)

And yes, I agree that this all-too-frequent "corruption" problem in users' Quicken data files is something the company should find a way to fix either permanently, or with some quick-fix utility which could zap the account information to fix whatever's wrong. Surely the programmers must have some idea what can happen to the structure of the data that blocks downloading (even if they don't know what causes it) so they could create a way to fix this problem.

jetucker98

Creating a new account and linking it to the same TD Ameritrade account downloads the recent transactions and properly adjusts the balance. But of course, it can't now download years of transactions, just a few months. And there's no way to copy or export/import transactions I already have.

Plus, I'm not aware of (and couldn't find) a feature to move holdings to a new account (I'm using Quicken for Mac). But even if that feature is available, does that mean I'd loss all the historical transaction data?

As for the corruption problem, they really need to have code to validate any data before trying to act upon it. And then they should log (or fix) the reason why it fails validation. At present, it apparently just silently fails, unless you manually make some change to the transaction amounts. And the fact that a manual edit causes it to work seems odd if the problem was bad data in the file (the previously existing "bad data" would still be there). This problem occurs on every quarterly reinvest dividend transaction. So the edit fix is only for the most recent transaction. The next time such a transaction comes in the problem still exists.

Another odd thing is that TDA shows a cash dividend and a buy. Quicken apparently combines those into a reinvest. But I'm not sure it did that in June -- in June and earlier I see separate cash dividend and buy transactions, which is the same way that Banktivity always shows them (the same way TDA shows them).

NotACPA

I think that you missed this step of @jacobs' process:

"then used the recently added feature to move all your holdings from the old account to the new account,"

jetucker98

Well, I didn't miss that he said that. I just can't find such a feature ... not in Quicken for Mac. I've looked again through every menu option and there's nothing that seems anything like that. I also don't recall any such feature in the setting up of a new account.

I just downloaded version 5.13 that was apparently released sometime today but I still don't see such a feature.

Exactly where would I find this?

jetucker98

@jacobs & @NotACPA ... you aren't referring to the simple "transfer shares" transaction, are you?

jacobs

Yes, sorry I wasn't clear: Transfer Shares. It automatically creates Remove and Add Share transactions in the respective accounts while maintaining the cost basis information from one account to the other. It's not a perfect solution, because you'd want to keep around the old account for its history, but the new account at least has the correct cost basis to move forward, so I thought this might be workable. 

jetucker98

I was mistaken ... it's not just Reinvest Dividend transaction that fail to update the share balance. A Sell Bonds just came through and it failed. I "duplicated" it, the balance updates for both. Delete the duplicate, the balance remains updated. So presumably, all transactions fail this way.

@jacobs , thanks for the clarification. But I'm not willing to break my accounts into two pieces because I have [removed], which works just fine and doesn't have that problem. Quicken is a little better on a few things and [removed] has a few annoyances, but Quicken's advantages are minor and don't come close to making up for the annoyance that would result from breaking up 7 accounts into two pieces like that.

When I get some time in a couple of weeks, I may try exporting either my Quicken data and/or my [removed] investment data via CSV and use the ProperSoft tools to convert for input. And maybe a route through Quicken for Windows. Perhaps one of those will work reasonably well and eliminate whatever the problem is. "Reasonably well" will still involve a huge amount of work because of broken transfers and probably many other things.

Not sure which of those will be best or easiest. Anyone have any experience with any of those?

weuphrat

I have the same problem, but can live with adding and then removing a transaction fee as recommended by support.

K.

I just discovered the same problem downloading a Vanguard account into Quicken for Mac. It only happened April 30 and May 1, 2020, not before - it affected dividend reinvestments as well as an automated purchase. Durplicating the transactions then deleting the duplicate worked. This is inconvenient but there's no acceptable alternative - I cannot transfer 25 years worth of transactions to a new account.