Error while reconciling investment account

dave344

When trying to reconcile an investment account that has a short sale and a cover on the same date, Quicken Premier 2020 (R29.22/Build 27.1.29.22) will throw a warning that I should use two transactions. Then it throws an "Error accessing Disk" message and finally it changes the CvrShrt transaction to a Bought. See attached screenshot. Is there a fix for this?

dave344

Sorry I accidently posted this in "All things Canadian" . Can it be moved to "Investing?"

q_lurker

I suggest your control on the sequence is 
a) not have transactions automatically entered
b) not doing an Accept all, and
c) accepting the transactions in the order you prefer. 

dave344

Sorry I accidently posted this in "All things Canadian" . Can it be moved to "Investing?"

dave344

This is a follow up to a message I posted recently in the wrong forum (All things Canadian).

PROBLEM: When reconciling an investment account, Quicken does not recognize a cover transaction when it precedes the short transaction in the register. Instead it changes the cover to a buy transaction leaving the investor with an open zero quantity position in the account (i.e., one long position and one equal and offsetting short position that net to zero).

The problem is best illustrated in the attached updated graphic.

This situation can occur when an investor opens and closes a short position on the same day and the transactions are downloaded in reverse order (cover precedes short) from the broker.

A work around is to change the date on the cover transaction in the Quicken register to something later than the associated short transaction. However this creates problems with reporting.

Is there a fix or work around other than deleting the cover transactions and reentering them so they appear in the register after the shorts?

I am using Quicken Premier v:R29.22 Build:27.1.29.22

Thanks
Dave

q_lurker

I suggest your control on the sequence is 
a) not have transactions automatically entered
b) not doing an Accept all, and
c) accepting the transactions in the order you prefer. 

Quicken Anja

Hello @dave344,

Thank you for reaching out to the Community to tell us about your issue, though I apologize that you are experiencing this.

If you haven't already, the first thing that I suggest you try is to validate your data file by following the steps below--

1. First Save a backup of your data file (just in case) 
2. Go to File
3. File Operations
4. Validate and Repair
5. Validate File
6. Ok
7. Close the data log that will pop-up after the validation has completed
8. Close Quicken
9. Wait at least 5 seconds
10. Reopen Quicken
11. Try again to see if the issue reoccurs/remains the same or gets corrected

You can also try super validating which are the same steps as above except that you will hold Ctrl and Shift on your keyboard when clicking on Validate and Repair in order to get the option for Super Validate.

Let us know how it goes!

dave344

Thank you q_lurker. That is a very practical work around.

I still hope the Quicken development team will fix this. It seems like a pretty simple fix: when matching a cover with a short Quicken just needs to consider same day transactions. Quicken does a pretty good job of handling investments, much better than other programs. But this is a pretty serious bug. Once you receive the error you can 1) "cancel" to preserve the cover status but then not be able to reconcile or 2) click "ok" in which case the cover is converted to a buy transaction and all subsequent short sales of the security are mismatched (i.e. the open short is then matched with the next available cover, then that short is matched with the next available cover and so on down the line for all short transactions that occurred in that security subsequent to the cover-to-buy conversion.) In the end you are left with an open long position (the converted buy) and a equal and offsetting open short position (the last short transaction). The two positions show in your holdings with a net quantity of zero. And the next time you pull up a closed transactions report, the P/L for all subsequent short positions will be wrong. If you encounter this situation you're in for a very confusing and frustrating experience.

Thanks again for your practical suggestion.

dave344

Thank you Quicken Anja

I reposted this issue in the correct forum (Investments) under "Error Reconciling Short Sale." There is a more detailed discussion going on there.

Just to close the loop, I did validate and repair and it did not fix the problem. Bottom line is this issue appears to be a bug in the program; i.e., Quicken is not able to match a cover with a short that occur on the same day if the cover precedes the short in the register. If you encounter this situation, either choice you are offered in error dialog box (cancel or OK) will create problems that are discussed in my other post. The work around is not to automatically accept downloaded transactions from your broker but to manually accept the downloaded transactions in the proper sequence (i.e., shorts before covers).

Thanks again for you help.