Transferring Accounts

buddyspal

I am changing investment brokers. My new broker provides the ability to download my accounts into Quicken. If I do this will Quicken recognize the data and transfer it to the new account or will I end up with two accounts with the same data.

q_lurker

My new broker provides the ability to download my accounts into Quicken. 

By omission, I assume your old brokerage did not offer that service and you were manually maintaining those records in Quicken.

If I do this will Quicken recognize the data and transfer it to the new account

You seem to be assuming you will need a new account for this.  I'll choose not to make that assumption.  IF all your securities are transferring over to the new brokerage, you'll have the option to associate the account at the new brokerage to your existing account in Quicken.  That is what I would try to do if at all possible, just to keep things 'cleaner'. 

If you choose to create a new account in Quicken for the new brokerage, @Boatnmaniac 's advice to use Shares Transferred is well advised.  You may well consider that the cleaner approach, but I suggest it is not the only approach.  Your choice.

NB:  The other holding (other than cash) that Shares Transferred will not move are short positions, if you happen to have any of those.    

Boatnmaniac

@buddyspal - No, your new broker will download all your holdings into your new account as if they are new....Quicken will not automatically transfer the holdings from the old account to the new account.  So, yes, you will have 2 accounts with the same ending and beginning balances data in them.

What you can do to eliminate this issue:

1)  Backup your data file in case something goes wrong.

2)  If you are transferring shares from the old to the new brokerage: 

• You can enter a "Shares Transferred Between Accounts" transaction in your old account for transfer to your new account...be sure to select the "All Securities" option in the transaction dialog so that you only need to do this one time.
• If it doesn't transfer the cash in the old account, you can also enter a "Cash Transferred out of Account" transaction, selecting your new account for the destination of the cash.
• When you start downloading from your new brokerage, it will dump a bunch of Add Shares transactions into the account.  Don't accept them.  Delete them so you don't have 2X the number of shares in your new account than are actually there.
• Also, most brokerages do have charges for transferring shares to other brokerages.  You might want to wait until you know if they do that and how that might affect your balances to be transferred.

3)  If your shares in your old brokerage are being liquidated so only cash is being transferred, then you can do the "Cash Transferred out of Account" transaction.  This is the cleanest and least expensive way to transfer the assets out of the old brokerage but it will trigger a taxable event (capital gains and losses...unless it is a retirement account) so it might or might not make sense from a tax perspective.

When all the transfers are completed you can close (not delete) your old brokerage account in Quicken from the Account Details, Display Options tab.  This will retain all your historical data in that account for viewing and for inclusion in reports.  Closing accounts are not reversible actions so don't close it until you are confident that everything balances out properly between the two accounts.

q_lurker

My new broker provides the ability to download my accounts into Quicken. 

By omission, I assume your old brokerage did not offer that service and you were manually maintaining those records in Quicken.

If I do this will Quicken recognize the data and transfer it to the new account

You seem to be assuming you will need a new account for this.  I'll choose not to make that assumption.  IF all your securities are transferring over to the new brokerage, you'll have the option to associate the account at the new brokerage to your existing account in Quicken.  That is what I would try to do if at all possible, just to keep things 'cleaner'. 

If you choose to create a new account in Quicken for the new brokerage, @Boatnmaniac 's advice to use Shares Transferred is well advised.  You may well consider that the cleaner approach, but I suggest it is not the only approach.  Your choice.

NB:  The other holding (other than cash) that Shares Transferred will not move are short positions, if you happen to have any of those.    

buddyspal

Thank you for your response. My shares are being transferred in kind and not being liquidated. What I wanted to do was create a new account and transfer all the holdings to it. This way I can save the old account which I have decades of data entered in it and "hide" it once the transfers are done. It appears that I will need the make the transfers manually since downloading it will duplicate the holdings. (I'm retired so I have the time.) However, when I try to create the new account Quicken locates my accounts at the new broker but states the accounts are an "Unknown Type". They go on to say that this is usually temporary and that it often takes more that a few days to fix. I will wait a few days and try again. Both you inputs was very helpful.