Many subjects regarding investment accounts seem to get closed with no solution
skeleton567
Quicken Windows Other Member ✭✭✭✭
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.
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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Answers
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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.QWin Premier subscription0 -
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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 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.
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I have reduced file size drastically by gradually archiving data to annual files for all non-investment date prior to 2014.
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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.0 -
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