Investment accounts always go out of balance
skeleton567
Quicken Windows Other Member ✭✭✭✭
Back on 6/10/2020 I posted my thoughts in response to a question on why investment accounts regularly go out of balance. Now after 6 months of experience with my three active investment accounts consisting of of one IRA and two brokerage accounts, after making a change within my Quicken file(s), here is my experience and conclusion.
At the time, I proposed that the reason for this recurring problem is that Quicken, by design, shares a common security list, and thus a common price history, with all accounts which might hold the same security. This was fairly adamantly denied by a number of respondents.
I proceeded to separate out these three active accounts to separate .QDF files. I have now performed transaction entry and updated prices within each individual account file for five month ends.
Result:
I have not had ANY of these accounts go out of balance or fail to match monthly statement totals historically.
My conclusion remains that Quicken sharing price history for securities held within multiple accounts is the root cause of the out-of-balance problem. Quicken itself recommends that when entering transactions that you manually adjust the SHARE PRICE to make the transaction total match the broker statement. The issue arises when the security is also held by other accounts and you again adjust the SHARE PRICE for transactions within those accounts. Due to varying numbers of decimal places and rounding to match transaction TOTALS in multiple accounts, the balances can and do change.
I do not ever download transactions or price history, but I would expect that this will also occur when one downloads transactions for multiple accounts.
My final step to counter this design flaw is to now begin to make security symbols and names unique across these accounts.
Unfortunately, some of my securities do not have symbols in the files, and I'm concerned about the effect on price history of making these adjustments. Quicken never made it clear that missing SYMBOLS prevent exporting of price history into .QIF files for transfer to other software such as the database I'm developing for my consolidated historical data. I hope that this can be fixed by researching individual security price history on existing web sites that have this available.
And the huge problem with this is that I have 28 annual files containing my financial history. Creating individual annual files to reduce file size is the only way I can maintain somewhat satisfactory performance of the application.
This will have to be rectified by correcting my current file which contains ALL my investing history, and then exporting appropriate date ranges to then import into my historical files.
At the time, I proposed that the reason for this recurring problem is that Quicken, by design, shares a common security list, and thus a common price history, with all accounts which might hold the same security. This was fairly adamantly denied by a number of respondents.
I proceeded to separate out these three active accounts to separate .QDF files. I have now performed transaction entry and updated prices within each individual account file for five month ends.
Result:
I have not had ANY of these accounts go out of balance or fail to match monthly statement totals historically.
My conclusion remains that Quicken sharing price history for securities held within multiple accounts is the root cause of the out-of-balance problem. Quicken itself recommends that when entering transactions that you manually adjust the SHARE PRICE to make the transaction total match the broker statement. The issue arises when the security is also held by other accounts and you again adjust the SHARE PRICE for transactions within those accounts. Due to varying numbers of decimal places and rounding to match transaction TOTALS in multiple accounts, the balances can and do change.
I do not ever download transactions or price history, but I would expect that this will also occur when one downloads transactions for multiple accounts.
My final step to counter this design flaw is to now begin to make security symbols and names unique across these accounts.
Unfortunately, some of my securities do not have symbols in the files, and I'm concerned about the effect on price history of making these adjustments. Quicken never made it clear that missing SYMBOLS prevent exporting of price history into .QIF files for transfer to other software such as the database I'm developing for my consolidated historical data. I hope that this can be fixed by researching individual security price history on existing web sites that have this available.
And the huge problem with this is that I have 28 annual files containing my financial history. Creating individual annual files to reduce file size is the only way I can maintain somewhat satisfactory performance of the application.
This will have to be rectified by correcting my current file which contains ALL my investing history, and then exporting appropriate date ranges to then import into my historical files.
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