Importing Stock Transactions

dddcooke

Couple of questions on importing stock transactions...
1. When updating stock transaction I get the window pane below registry window but the view is so small and can not be adjusted to see a bigger view and identify transactions better. I have to scroll back and forth a lot. If the preview window was bigger it would make things easier. Can this be done?

2. Is there a way to import the transaction in the order my broker sends it to me. updating the transaction come in a Action order also causing me to scroll a lot. Today I had about 50 tranactions that took me 30 minutes to confirm. If down loaded in order of transation would make things much easier.
Thanks

Tom Young

You can resize the download window.  Slowly move the mouse pointer down to the bottom of the transaction list and just after the "open" transaction entry area you should get an arrow with arrowheads at the top an bottom.  Click the mouse button and drag.

I'm not sure I'm following along with your second question.  I think you're saying that the download list is ordered by action but you'd like to see that list in chronological order, from first transaction in the morning to last transaction?  You can do limited sorting on fields in the download window.  You might try clicking on the Date heading to see how that resorts the list.

dddcooke

I don't see what you're talking about on the resize. I've spent a few minutes and not seeing any indication of up/down mouse change to resize.

I've tried clicking on the date and it does not sort.

What about importing from excel/CSV file into investment accounts. I only seem to find bank account imports.

Jim_Harman

@Tom Young I think your comments apply to banking registers but unfortunately not to investing accounts.

@dddcooke Quicken does not import transaction data in CSV format.

dddcooke

how can we get quicken to update both of these basic feature added especially now that we have to pay yearly to use quicken? Again basic features window resizing and import function...
Thanks for the responses.

Bob_L

Curious as to why you are asking about importing to investment accounts, i.e. I do your brokerages not support direct connect or express webconnect?

dddcooke

The issue is when downloading from ameritrade the transactions don't come in order of the transaction and the window I have is 4 transactions at a time and causes me to have to scroll back and forth to add the orders in via transaction time. I spent 30 minutes this morning scrolling back and forth to enter in 52 transactions. If I could import or see more lines of the download would cut my time to process the transactions by half if not more.
Thanks
Dave

Bob_L

We don’t typically recommend it, but changing your downloading transactions preference to automatically enter the transactions into your transaction register might work better for you?

Jim_Harman

@dddcooke I feel your pain about the order of transaction downloads. Unfortunately I think it is not always obvious what order they should be presented in.

For example I sometimes have 3 Divs on the same day followed by 3 corresponding Buys of the money market fund. I would like them to be paired in the transaction list so that each Div is followed by the corresponding Buy. That makes the cash balance go to zero after each transaction pair and I can see at a glance what is going on. I can do this manually by selecting the order in which I accept the transactions, but it would be nice if this happened automatically. I doubt this corresponds to the download order.

If you want to see the actual download order, you can study the OFX log. 

dddcooke

> @Jim_Harman said:
> @dddcooke I feel your pain about the order of transaction downloads. Unfortunately I think it is not always obvious what order they should be presented in.
>
> For example I sometimes have 3 Divs on the same day followed by 3 corresponding Buys of the money market fund. I would like them to be paired in the transaction list so that each Div is followed by the corresponding Buy. That makes the cash balance go to zero after each transaction pair and I can see at a glance what is going on. I can do this manually by selecting the order in which I accept the transactions, but it would be nice if this happened automatically. I doubt this corresponds to the download order.
>
> If you want to see the actual download order, you can study the OFX log. 

Where do I find the logs for this? thanks!

UKR

Have you tried using the F11 - key toggle to switch your account register to some sort of full-screen mode?

Pressing F11 closes the menu bars at the top and the Account Bar along the side and makes a few extra lines of transactions available.
Pressing F11 a 2nd time restores the menu bars.

I haven't had many investment transactions lately, so I'm not quite sure ... the old brain gets a little foggy ... after accepting the first transaction, does a button "Hide accepted transactions" appear in the Downloaded Transactions tab? If so, click it. This will remove accepted transactions in the tab area and help with scrolling and navigation. I also forgot (and can't easily test) ... can you sort the downloaded transactions by columns other than date? Try clicking the column headers.

Tom Young

@dddcooke

Do Help > Log Files > OFX Log.

These can be very difficult to read but if you isolate to the most recent transaction update from that particular financial institution you should be able to figure it out.

The section "OFX 2.2 Specification46311/26/201713.9.2.4.4Investment Transaction Aggregates" of the OFX schema here: https://www.ofx.net/downloads/OFX 2.2.pdf

should guide you.

dddcooke

> @Tom Young said:
> @dddcooke Do Help > Log Files > OFX Log.These can be very difficult to read but if you isolate to the most recent transaction update from that particular financial institution you should be able to figure it out.The section "OFX 2.2 Specification46311/26/201713.9.2.4.4Investment Transaction Aggregates" of the OFX schema here: https://www.ofx.net/downloads/OFX 2.2.pdfshould guide you.

Thanks for the details.

Yes the logs have all the required details...in the log I can see the transaction, price, ticker, date/time of transaction, etc. Since it collects this what can quicken do to make updating transactions easier?

The format appears to be HTML Markup
Dave

Tom Young

Are the transactions being downloaded in chronological order?  I sort of assume that Quicken puts transactions into the download window as they appear in the OFX log, but I've never really looked at that. 

If the transactions aren't in chronological order then Quicken would need to incorporate a routine to sort them and I'd doubt that they'd want to do that. 

Jim_Harman

If you have a specific idea for an improvement, you can post it in the Windows investing Ideas section of this forum here:
https://community.quicken.com/categories/investments-%28windows%29
 

dddcooke

> @Tom Young said:
> Are the transactions being downloaded in chronological order?  I sort of assume that Quicken puts transactions into the download window as they appear in the OFX log, but I've never really looked at that. 
> If the transactions aren't in chronological order then Quicken would need to incorporate a routine to sort them and I'd doubt that they'd want to do that. 

Seems the last trade to the first trade transaction.
Well quicken is doing a sort when it puts it in the download window of brought, cover, sold then short sale.

With my limited DB skills I could do a MS Access DB with more reporting options now knowing how the OFX file works. Not sure if Quicken sees this, hope so, as I could see major enhancements to our yearly subscription service.

Thanks all for responding. Have a great holiday season!

Jim_Harman

The developers and product managers do review the ideas posted in the Product Ideas section and have actually implemented some of them in recent months.

For this issue, as I said before it is not obvious what the "best" transaction order would be beyond chronological. I would like to see Divs paired with corresponding money market fund Buys if they are on the same day, but this is not always possible. For example sometimes there are several Divs and a lump-sum Buy of the MMF.

Earlier this year there was a lively discussion here
https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20025838#Comment_20025838
about the transaction order in banking registers.

q_lurker

I note that the downloaded transactions for spending account can be sorted by the various headers but not so with investment accounts.  Adding that feature to the investment account download view would seem to me to be a fairly easy addition to program.  Of course that is still only a simple one-level sort when some might want a multi-level sort.  

dddcooke

This weekend I put together an autohotkey program to enter the stocks in order of transactions. I get a CSV file from the broker for the transactions, quick manipulation of the excel, dump into ms access (for other tracking purpose), create an output form for the transactions. Autohotkey displays a menu for Buy, Sold, Short Sale and Cover Short, it copies all the required fields in to variables, goes to quicken selects the correct transaction and send all the values in the correct fields, then confirms I want to continue for me to check accuracy and saves. Last week I had 200+ transactions and through quicken took me over 60 minutes to search, accept and fix errors for mis-matches. Now takes me 10 minutes with the autohotkey with this many transactions.

I hope quicken developer sees how a very novice programmer created this simple step to improve the product for themselves and improves the stock transaction process within quicken.

Thanks for all the comments and suggestions!
Dave