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Many subjects regarding investment accounts seem to get closed with no solution

skeleton567

I think it is interesting that many of us long-time users are getting turned off from reporting and discussing the problems. Postings regarding out-of-balance accounts always get terminated without getting any real results.

I have again this month found issues with multiple investment accounts in my current file that contains all investment history from 1950 onward and other financial data since 2014.

The first account I tried to reconcile for June was out of balance when I checked the opening balance against the statement before I began. This account was opened November 2010 and has been balanced and reconciled to statements every month since.

This month when I discovered the problem, I began with the first statement and began reviewing the data. I have so far reviewed 84 months of data, and have found various issues throughout the history. As near as I can tell, the problems seem to be most closely related to:

1. Mutual funds that are the most active.
2. Mutual funds that are held in more than one account.
3. Investment accounts that have current activity. 18 closed inactive historical accounts continue to show zero balances as they should as funds were moved out to others.
4. Non-investment accounts never seem to have problems after reconciliation.
5. All account types are manually entered and no downloads are ever done.
6. Out of balance accounts typically have a cash balance, which is never the real situation since my broker rolls any cash into and out of a Cash Reserves 'security' every month which are shown as buys and sells of fractional shares always at $1.00.
7. During file validation, I don't recall that I have ever had a problem reported that was in any other account type but investments.

The common evidence is month-end Holdings screens which no longer match statement data. Holdings data is often incorrect even for funds which have not had any current activity.

Obviously this COULD be caused by entering transactions with incorrect dates. but that would surely be evidenced by finding un-reconciled transactions in the history. And I seriously doubt that I would have entered these spread over the entire 10-year history in this account.

Out of the 84 months that I have reviewed for this single account, I would estimate that 80% of them have required some correction to re-match them to statements from the broker.

My files are regularly validated and I have reduced file size drastically by gradually archiving data to annual files for all non-investment date prior to 2014.

When reconciling I normally enter all transactions manually, reconcile to the broker statement, and manually flag all transactions as reconciled before moving to the next account.

Quicken seems to have basically two problems, those of correctly downloading data for all account types, and of handling investment accounts in particular. I can understand the ongoing issues with downloading due to many and various sources, but the problems with entirely manual data entry need to be addressed and handled internally.

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Jim_Harman

How large are the discrepancies you are seeing? small fractions of a share/a few pennies, or much larger?

When you enter transactions, do you enter the total dollar amount and shares and let Quicken calculate the price per share, or do you enter the price per share? The former is almost always better IMO to reduce round-off issues.

Note that in the most recent release Quicken started tracking share quantities to 6 decimal places and that may account for your issues.

skeleton567

Jim, first of all, thank you for not giving the usual response from the 'experts' on here who always pooh-pooh these problems.

Normally I will enter the shares and price exactly from the broker statement, then will make any adjustments to the price as required to reconcile to the reported transaction total. Then from the Holdings page I may have to make any further adjustments to reconcile to the month-end statement total, again by adjusting share price to the max of the six decimals. This should record a month-end price quote for each security with the exact share figure. I have even written my own calculation process in an SQL database which will calculate individual shares received in single transactions on the statement which result from combined dividends, short-term, and long-term shares, in order to exactly account for these individual sources of gain. These are entered and matched to the transaction total for shares and dollars. I have always utilized as many decimal places as are needed to exactly match the statement values for shares and total dollars, and don't think I have ever not been able to do this exactly. My SQL process will report any calculation that does not match the transaction total to the penny and shares to what is reported.

All is well until another month closes. Checking the statement opening balance from the statement to the last Quicken Holding balance, I find it has often changed, even before entering new data.

I admit that I am still using QW2014 Premier, but can state unequivocally that I never had these problems with prior versions. I see no reason to update unless I can be assured this has been corrected.

Sorry, I forgot to answer you question on how large the discrepancies may be. They can range from a few dollars per security to several hundred dollars net per month. It seems that months with more activity will have more problems. This all indicates to me that there are errors in how data gets read from and saved to the structures. I do NOT believe it is related to corruption other than in the internal operations of the software.

I just remembered another 'symptom' I observe in that even with my data volume reduced, it will often take 5 to 15 seconds to save a new or modified transaction to an investment account, during which the cursor will continually flicker before moving to the next line. This does not seem to happen in other account types.

skeleton567

I have even considered modifying all my data to make securities, and therefore price history, unique to each account. To accomplish this, I would export each account to my own database, make the changes there, and then import back into quicken.

Another approach might be to maintain each investment account in its own Q file in order to avoid conflicts between accounts.

Regardless, none of this should be necessary to keep my data valid.

Sherlock

skeleton567 said:

...
6. Out of balance accounts typically have a cash balance, which is never the real situation since my broker rolls any cash into and out of a Cash Reserves 'security' every month which are shown as buys and sells of fractional shares always at $1.00.
...
I have reduced file size drastically by gradually archiving data to annual files for all non-investment date prior to 2014.
...

I suspect the cash discrepancies in the investment accounts may be due to the attempt to reduce the file size. For example, if you removed a transaction from a non-investment account that draws from an investment account, the cash balance of the investment account will increase.

skeleton567

Sherlock, depending on what you mean by 'transaction, I don't believe that is correct. My understanding is, and it makes sense from a logical standpoint, that the year-end processing of a file would not remove both sides of a transfer. That would be horrible system design because any account with transfers would be incorrect. I always keep all investment history in my active file, and only take out bank and credit card data.

I have done year-end processes on the files many times, and have never had either side of transfer transactions disappear. And the problems I am finding are NOT transfers. The most common problems seem to involve missing or modified month-end price history, and dividend records that may or may not have been reinvested.

Yes, if you DELETE a transfer, BOTH accounts would be affected, and that is as it should be. All my investment depostis/withdrawals are recorded as transfers between a broker and my credit union accounts. This preserves the records of where the money goes, versus just a straight 'withdrawal'. Historically, Q had handled this with no problem with balances.

I have manually corrected this account in particular, month by month, from when it was opened in 2010, so far to 8/31/2019, and would say that 75% of the months have had errors, missing transactions, invalid (or missing) month-end prices, etc.

My current plan is to get the account reconciled up to current, export a QIF file, load it into my database, then reconcile the latest statement, export another QIF, load it also into my database, and then use SQL to compare the two tables. This will at least find changes to anything that gets put into a QIF file. There has to be an answer to this other than 'What difference does it make?'

I already know that Q continually makes stupid changes to my data during 'validate and repair' processing that continually need to be undone. It's favorite one is to change simple 'buy' transactions into the 'cash' security to stock splits. This cash is held in Fidelity Government Cash Reserves, ALWAYS priced at $1.00 per share, for example a $1.20 dividend that is not reinvested is treated as a BUY of 1.200000 shares at $1.00.

Thanks for the suggestions, and at this point I'm up for any ideas that I can try.

jbethgoss

I agree with the type and effect of investment discrepancies that skeleton is reporting on how Q is handling both manual and downloaded transactions. I have recently undertaken a project to update and reconcile all my Q investment accounts for the past 10 years. The data load is huge. I am a CPA and very familiar with broker and investment world. Some of my brokers provide data download, but some to do not, or only provide CSV data, that I have to reformat for import. Quicken is not very transparent about how downloaded transactions are handled, and the protocols for reconciling with "placeholder" transactions are not intuitive and not consistent.
I am a long-time Q user and very disappointed with this area of service.

skeleton567

jbethgoss said:

I agree with the type and effect of investment discrepancies that skeleton is reporting on how Q is handling both manual and downloaded transactions. I have recently undertaken a project to update and reconcile all my Q investment accounts for the past 10 years. The data load is huge. I am a CPA and very familiar with broker and investment world. Some of my brokers provide data download, but some to do not, or only provide CSV data, that I have to reformat for import. Quicken is not very transparent about how downloaded transactions are handled, and the protocols for reconciling with "placeholder" transactions are not intuitive and not consistent.
I am a long-time Q user and very disappointed with this area of service.

jbeth, there is even more evidence of the problem as I revisit all my investment records. First, there are no problems among accounts which do not share common securities, meaning that they ALSO do not share security price history. I have 21 investment accounts with history on my .QDF file, including employer sponsored profit-sharing, rollover IRA's, 529 plans for grandchildren, current IRA, two current brokerage accounts. The currently active accounts, the managed IRA and two managed brokerage, all share common mutual funds. These accounts were originated respectively in 2003, 2010, and 2019.

Now here is the significant thing. In reviewing and checking balances against broker statements, ALL of which had been manually entered and balanced, the IRA was consistent in matching statements from 2003 to 2009. Then when a brokerage account with shared securities was added in 2010, I begin to see balances in Q that no longer match statements. It's like the old saying, 'You can't have it both ways'. The finding is that invariably the difference is between security totals/account totals is due to prices extended to multiple decimals by the balancing process that have changed a price for the same security in multiple accounts, thus throwing one or the other account off balance.

This has lead to my project to move the accounts in question to separate files and redo the balancing to statements. I am now at the point of having two of the three accounts done through 12/31/2017.

Then it would appear that I am going to have to force Q to think all the securities are unique, probably by re-naming and faking symbols. Many of the funds have long names, for instance Fidelity has numerous funds names Strategic Advisors with an appendage that makes them fairly long. But by doing this, I hope to force Q to maintain a unique price history for each account/security pair.

Then there is the thing where their statements are subtotaled by stock funds, bond funds, ETF's, short-term funds. This would be a nice feature for the Holdings display in Q also.

Once this is all completed, I plan to experiment with merging the separate files back to a single .QDF to see if the out-of-balance problem is fixed. I hope the result will be unique price history for each account. Unfortunately, this will increase file size and also the nasty flickering message that Q is updating.

All of this is the result of design flaws in software development which could be avoided and/or FIXED. it is also unforgivable that this is allowed to continue.

It's not bad to HAVE bedbugs, it's just bad to KEEP them.