Placeholder Issues When Setting Up a 401k

pfiscal

I'm setting up a Fidelity 401k
I click add account and enter the institution and do it all electronically.
Everything syncs great but quicken enters a placeholder transaction.
When it does this, it has the cash value match the investment value and the total value ends up being doubled.
I've read a ton on placeholder transactions and get the general concept. I'm supposed to resolve by adding missing transactions. Thing is, I don't want to manually add transactions going back 3 years. Further, I'm not sure how this would resolve the situation. The value currently shown is double the value in the account. If I just add transactions, it will also add to the actual value that's being shown won't it?

Can anyone just tell me a straight forward way to add a 401k?
How is this supposed to be done?
Without manually adding everything making this a 40 hour process?

Quicken Francisco

Hello @pfiscal

Thank you for reaching out on the community and telling us about your issue. Placeholders generally don't need to have the transaction added rather when you click on the investment account it'll say fix placeholders which generally just needs the price you originally bought them for to identify performance related metrics. You don't need to actually put them in if you don't want to and this is what you ended up doing. If you're primarily looking to track the investments without worrying about about any of the previous data what you've done is the easiest way to do that. 

I have fairly limited knowledge of investments but I do know other users have been working with them for a much longer time so they may have some other suggestions for you differing from what you've done. If you do let us know and we'll see what we can do.

Thanks,

Quicken Francisco

pfiscal

I should mention, I've deleted the placeholder, and now it shows the investment balance is correct, but the cash balance is 0. I'm not even sure what this is supposed to look like now. Any guidance is much appreciated!

Quicken Francisco

Hello @pfiscal

Thank you for reaching out on the community and telling us about your issue. Placeholders generally don't need to have the transaction added rather when you click on the investment account it'll say fix placeholders which generally just needs the price you originally bought them for to identify performance related metrics. You don't need to actually put them in if you don't want to and this is what you ended up doing. If you're primarily looking to track the investments without worrying about about any of the previous data what you've done is the easiest way to do that. 

I have fairly limited knowledge of investments but I do know other users have been working with them for a much longer time so they may have some other suggestions for you differing from what you've done. If you do let us know and we'll see what we can do.

Thanks,

Quicken Francisco

pfiscal

Thanks. I did try to do the "estimate price" option for fixing the placeholders. However, it did not seem to change anything or work. I followed the documentation steps but it did not fix anything. Would be curious if there are updated docs somewhere for my version.

Jim_Harman

It is often correct for the Cash Balance of a 401(k) account to be zero, so you may have already solved your issue.

When the account s working correctly, the Cash Balance is the amount of un-invested money in the account - generally contributions that you have sent to the account that have not yet been used to purchase securities.

If the Total Market Value at the bottom right of the account's transaction list (register) matches the amount reported by Fidelity, your job is done!

pfiscal

> @Jim_Harman said:
> It is often correct for the Cash Balance of a 401(k) account to be zero, so you may have already solved your issue.
>
> When the account s working correctly, the Cash Balance is the amount of un-invested money in the account - generally contributions that you have sent to the account that have not yet been used to purchase securities.
>
> If the Total Market Value at the bottom right of the account's transaction list (register) matches the amount reported by Fidelity, your job is done!

Thanks for the clarification!
That's what I thought but wanted to confirm.

Jim_Harman

You are welcome!

I should add that you should also compare the number of shares of each security in Quicken to what Fidelity reports.

If you are set up for downloading, you can click the gear at the top right of the account's transaction list and select "Reconcile Shares..." Note any differences reported but do not let Quicken create Placeholders.

You can use Update Share balance to force the balances to match. When selecting the security to update, use the arrow next to the entry box and select the security to update rather than typing in the name. If you type it in, you may create duplicate securities by mistake.

Even better, you can correct any missing or incorrect transactions to make the balances match.