Anyone has problems with ESPP Launch Wizard?

Question

The feature worked fine 6 months ago.  However, when I tried entering the Buy ESPP shares data today, the security name was greyed out.  When I tried entering the Sell ESPP for some shares that I acquired a long time ago, it gave an error message that I don't have any shares left.  Anyone else has this problem?  Thanks.

mshiggins · Accepted Answer

I had what sounds like the same issue, it was several years ago. It seemed like the ESPP securities or the ESPP security type itself had become corrupted. I could not enter ESPP buys or sells for my existing ESPPs. I even tried with new test ESPPs, it was still impossible to enter ESPP buys.

I tried validating a Quicken copy and super validating. Neither helped. I stepped back through subsequently older backups until I found one where ESPP buys and sells still worked. That backup was 2 years old. Based on the date of the good backup, apparently the conversion from Q2013 to Q2014 caused the corruption.

I tried rebuilding the 2 year old backup in Q2015, but that version was so buggy and unstable it would constantly crash. It seemed the constant crashing would just exacerbate the corruption so I reverted to Q2013 and completed the recovery there.

Hopefully a fix will not be so arduous in your case. My first troubleshooting step would be to validate a Quicken copy of your file:

File | File Operations | Copy
File | File Operations | Validate & Repair: Validate

If that does not resolve the issue, I would restore successively older backups until you find one where ESPP buys and sells work and rebuild that file to fill in the intervening data.