Quicken / Brokerage Balance Disagreement

kpmort

I recently purchased a security. Since it takes a couple of days for the download feed to pick up this transaction, I always manually enter these types of security actions as soon as the trade confirmation report is available. Never had an issue until this latest activity. The next time I downloaded transactions from the brokerage account, a Placeholder entry was inserted that undid the purchase and returned the cash to my cash balance. Now my Quicken account shows that I do not own any of the shares of the company but my brokerage account clearly shows the purchase and share balance. When I click Reconcile Shares, I get the "Your Quicken account and your Brokerage Holdings are in agreement." response. Clearly this is wrong. I have deleted all transactions and the security from the Security List. Tried to download and get no notice of balance misalignment. I can manually add the transaction back and all is well until the next time I do a download and the process starts all over again. Clearly Quicken thinks the Brokerage download is telling it that I have no shares of this stock. I have been maintaining this account in Quicken since 2003 and have never seen this failure mode before. Help!

Sherlock

First, it's really not a good idea to delete the downloaded transactions if you expect to be able to import them again.  Quicken will remember that it had already imported these transactions into the register and won't present them again.  A better approach is to restore a backup saved prior to importing the downloaded transactions.

Regarding placeholders transactions, you may want to review: https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7267839/quicken-faq-managing-placeholder-entries-in-quicken-for-windows 

My preference is to never include placeholder transactions and so, I suggest you delete any placeholder transactions you've accepted and, if necessary, correct the transaction list.  Whenever there is balance difference, I suggest determining the cause and resolving the issue properly.

When importing security data from a financial institution, Quicken relies on a unique value for a security used by the financial institution to identify the security in the data file.  Quicken refers to this field as the CUSIP ID.  When Quicken receives a CUSIP ID that it is not already bound to a security in Quicken, Quicken will prompt us to associate the security with a new security or a security that is not already assigned a CUSIP ID.  To clear the CUSIP ID assigned to a security, uncheck Matched with online security on the Edit Security Details window of the security and the next time Quicken processes an unbound CUSIP ID, the security should be available to be matched.  (For publicly traded securities, the CUSIP ID may be the same as the CUSIP number.)

Quicken generates the placeholder transactions for an account based on comparison with the share balance obtained from the financial institution using the CUSIP ID to match the security.