Why doesn't my account balance match the market value posted on one of my brokerage accounts?

bkal911

Why doesn't the account balance on my Quicken ledger match the market value posted on that account?

Tom Young

There could be a lot of reasons for that.  The first thing to do is to see, for each security, that the share balance and the quote are the same as what you're seeing at the financial institution (FI).  Timing differences and slightly different quotes are not all that uncommon.

Another source of differences can be associated with placeholder entries.  More times than I care to count I've received placeholder suggestions where, obviously, the "share balance" that's used to come up with the suggested placeholder is just before a transaction that I've just downloaded and accepted into the transaction list.  If you automatically accept placeholders into the transaction list you can end up with the wrong share balance.

Tom Young

There could be a lot of reasons for that.  The first thing to do is to see, for each security, that the share balance and the quote are the same as what you're seeing at the financial institution (FI).  Timing differences and slightly different quotes are not all that uncommon.

Another source of differences can be associated with placeholder entries.  More times than I care to count I've received placeholder suggestions where, obviously, the "share balance" that's used to come up with the suggested placeholder is just before a transaction that I've just downloaded and accepted into the transaction list.  If you automatically accept placeholders into the transaction list you can end up with the wrong share balance.