quicken has detected transactions that require additional information?

wingfield65

Hello,

I just created a new investment account. it's a managed account so there's lots of trading (I'm not interested in comments on whether managed accounts are good / bad). On my first download, I have 958 transactions that when I try to accept all - provide me with the message "quicken has detected transactions that require additional information before they can be accepted into your account. to accept these transactions, do the following.......". so I clicked accept on a single transaction. it did not ask me for additional information, it just accepted the transaction.

so quicken wants me to accept 958 transactions one at a time?? how do I get around this. is there a setting somewhere that allows me to just accept all?

2nd question - directly related since I've already run through this exercise on another new account. since quicken only downloads whatever the financial institution makes available, all of my securities require placeholders to make the quantity correct. same thing, quicken wants me to create a placeholder one at a time. so for this account, that would be another huge effort since the number of securities is significant (several hundred).

I appreciate any guidance on how to address the issue, other than to click ok over 1000 times.

Tom Young

My guess would be that Quicken is stumbling over sale transactions and wants to know how you want to determine the cost basis for the sales, e.g., LIFO, FIFO, lot identification, etc.  You might not even be in a position to answer these questions. 

Also, since Quicken is creating placeholders it it sounds like you're not receiving all the detail needed to create, purely through transactions, a number of shares that agrees to the share balance figures being downloaded by the manager.

Given the situation - hundreds of securities and probably thousands of transactions - it might be futile to even try to use Quicken to record every single transaction.  If you're routinely getting placeholders - an indication that there's missing information in the detail - trying to keep up with every single Buy, Sell, Dividend Reinvestment, Stock Split, etc. is probably pointless and you could be fighting this with every single download.

You might be better off simply transferring money into the managed Account, buying a dummy "security" at a $1 per share each time, then valuing this "security" at month or quarter end at a price that brings the Account's value into agreement with the manager's statement.  That will keep your cost and Net Worth correctly stated for Quicken and you'll rely on the manager's information for analysis.

wingfield65

Hello Tom,

thank you for your response.

>> My guess would be that Quicken is stumbling over sale transactions and wants to know how you want to determine the cost basis for the sales, e.g., LIFO, FIFO, lot identification, etc. You might not even be in a position to answer these questions.

it's an IRA, so there is no cost basis. everything coming out will be at marginal tax rates.

>> Also, since Quicken is creating placeholders it it sounds like you're not receiving all the detail needed to create, purely through transactions, a number of shares that agrees to the share balance figures being downloaded by the manager.

it's a new quicken account and the financial institution only downloads a couple of years of data. as such, all the prior years of information is not available, so quicken needs a placeholder. this effort will only occur (I hope??) on this first download; but it's still a large amount of clicks.

I was hoping there's a setting somewhere that tells quicken it's an IRA with no basis (ie : no form 8606 filed) and to just ignore all the cost basis stuff. this is a regular occurrence for folks.

I'd appreciate any other thoughts you may have.

NotACPA

Even investments in Retirement type accounts have a "Cost Basis".  Not for tax purposes, but rather to be able to measure investment performance.

Tom Young

Quicken doesn't discriminate when it comes to tracking securities' cost bases so sales of all securities in all Accounts will need to have a cost basis figure for sales.  There's a setting under "Preferences" that can automate the process of determining basis for securities sold; you might look at that and see if it helps. 

NotACPA

And, unless you gave your brokerage specific instructions, for each sale, to the contrary, the brokerage almost certainly chose FIFO.

Did you?

wingfield65

thank you Tom and NotACPA. guess it's going to be a long day. wondering if there's anywhere to submit enhancement requests. I would not think there's anything inherently difficult about defaulting cost method so that accept all works; especially as there's no data to input. I'm simply clicking ok for each transaction

wingfield65

Tom

>> And, unless you gave your brokerage specific instructions, for each sale, to the contrary, the brokerage almost certainly chose FIFO.
Did you?

nope.

Tom Young

wingfield65 said:

Tom

>> And, unless you gave your brokerage specific instructions, for each sale, to the contrary, the brokerage almost certainly chose FIFO.
Did you?

nope.

That was NotACPA who brought that up, but I'd guess that's not terribly relevant inside an IRA. 

If the managers decide to sell 10 shares of Company X, any 10 shares of Company X will do since there's no income tax effect of sales inside an IRA.  So if you select to use FIFO for your automatic calculation of cost basis but the manager uses LIFO, it makes no difference to you.  Your total contributions is still correctly stated, your total account value is still correctly stated, the only disagreement between you (Quicken) and the mangers will be between "realizied" gain/loss and "unrealized" gain/loss, and that's irrelevant.

I haven't tried using the automatic process that allows Quicken to calculate the basis for sales so I don't know if it works in an "Accept all" situation.  But even if it doesn't, I'd think all you'd have to do is to accept each sale and then use select all for everything else.