Is there a bulk edit way for me to convert all "bought" transactions to "Added"

moodybaaz

For my 401K account, I finally configured it and downloaded lots of transactions. However, unfortunately, the transactions show up as "bought" instead of "Added". What this unfortunately means is that I have all transactions contributing to negative cash in my account. I will like to bulk edit these transactions to "Added" (or equivalent) so that it does not much up the cash in my account; is there a way?

I for the heck of me cannot find a way to do bulk edit these transactions :/

Jim_Harman

Here is another approach to this situation:

It sounds like the downloaded transactions do not include the cash you contributed, nor any company match, so there was no cash in the account to make up for all the Buys.

Instead of editing the downloaded transactions, you might enter the missing contributions. These don't have to exactly match payroll deduction, but you could enter a series of Deposits in the 401k account, perhaps one per year or one per quarter, to bring the cash balance back to zero. 

This will more accurately reflect what actually happened in the account, and should be less work than editing all the downloaded transactions.

As always, back up your data file before changing historical transactions, in case the result is not what you expected.

Sherlock

The Shares Transferred Between Accounts wizard should do the trick: open the account, press Ctrl + N, select Shares Transferred Between Accounts in the Enter transactions: pull-down menu, choose All securities, select the 401K account in the Transfer account: pull-down menu and Enter/Done.  You may then use a customized Transaction report to delete the unwanted transactions.

Before making any significant changes to the Quicken file, always save a backup: press Ctrl + B

q_lurker

To expand on Sherlock's thoughts, you can use the Shares Transferred trick to remove and then add the shares back into the same account as of a date of your choosing.  At that point, you will have the original Buy transactions, some newly generated Remove Shares Transactions, and a whole series of Add Shares that somewhat duplicate the original Buys.  

You can then use a BANKING transaction report (customize to include the 401k account) to select and group delete the original Buys and the newly created Removes.

My hesitation about that procedure is that your holdings will then be nothing before the date of all the newly created Add Shares.  If you are at all interested in how the 401k has grown over time, you may miss out on that aspect.  Also, the remove and adds will also include shares acquired through reinvestments.  You had only cited Buys as your interest in editing.  

There are some further steps you can make to tweak the process but that starts approaching the difficulty level of just editing the existing Buys.  

With regard to editing the individual Buys, you might want to consider editing them to be a self-reference the source of funds as the [401k] account (making it a BuyX rather than the straightforward Buy).  A BuyX that uses the same account will not decrease the cash balance in the account.  I don't know if that edit is any easier than changing the Buy to an Add.  

HTH

Jim_Harman

Here is another approach to this situation:

It sounds like the downloaded transactions do not include the cash you contributed, nor any company match, so there was no cash in the account to make up for all the Buys.

Instead of editing the downloaded transactions, you might enter the missing contributions. These don't have to exactly match payroll deduction, but you could enter a series of Deposits in the 401k account, perhaps one per year or one per quarter, to bring the cash balance back to zero. 

This will more accurately reflect what actually happened in the account, and should be less work than editing all the downloaded transactions.

As always, back up your data file before changing historical transactions, in case the result is not what you expected.

moodybaaz

Thanks for all the advice. In the end, given that I had converted many buy to Add manually, I went with Jim's suggestion and added cash contributions and company match as a once a year transaction and left the bought as bought.

Thanks!