Update securities in a 401k

RebelTX812

I have a 401k that I started tracking in Quicken for Windows in the 90s. Since I have moved to the mac I now have 2 of every security & the balance is way off... How do I get rid of the duplicates?

RickO

Are the "2 of every security" actually two different but very similar securities? IOW, if you open Window > Securities, do they both appear separately in the list? If so, it should be easy to get rid of the bad one. Go to the transaction register for the 401k and do a search (click the magnifying glass to restrict the search to Security/Payee or Symbol field) and enter the exact security name or symbol of the bad one (which should be different than the good one). Once the register is showing only transactions for that security, Select All and Delete them.

On the other hand, if if you have double everything because everything is duplicated at the transaction level, this might be harder to fix. If there's any field that uniquely differs between each transaction and it's twin, you could sort by that field to get the duplicates into a contiguous list, use shift-click to select them and delete en mass. You might want to try turning on some rarely used fields (menu View > Columns) such as Action or FITID to see if you can identify such a field. 

However, if each duplicate transaction is identical to its twin in every field, there's not going to be a way to sort the duplicates into a contiguous list that you can delete en mass. In that case, you're probably stuck with going down the list one by one and deleting every other one. This can be done completely on the keyboard with three keystrokes (down arrow, delete, enter). But it would require extreme care to be sure not to make any mistakes.

For this reason, whatever you do, be sure to make a backup or copy of the file that you can revert to in case of error. Good luck.

RickO

Are the "2 of every security" actually two different but very similar securities? IOW, if you open Window > Securities, do they both appear separately in the list? If so, it should be easy to get rid of the bad one. Go to the transaction register for the 401k and do a search (click the magnifying glass to restrict the search to Security/Payee or Symbol field) and enter the exact security name or symbol of the bad one (which should be different than the good one). Once the register is showing only transactions for that security, Select All and Delete them.

On the other hand, if if you have double everything because everything is duplicated at the transaction level, this might be harder to fix. If there's any field that uniquely differs between each transaction and it's twin, you could sort by that field to get the duplicates into a contiguous list, use shift-click to select them and delete en mass. You might want to try turning on some rarely used fields (menu View > Columns) such as Action or FITID to see if you can identify such a field. 

However, if each duplicate transaction is identical to its twin in every field, there's not going to be a way to sort the duplicates into a contiguous list that you can delete en mass. In that case, you're probably stuck with going down the list one by one and deleting every other one. This can be done completely on the keyboard with three keystrokes (down arrow, delete, enter). But it would require extreme care to be sure not to make any mistakes.

For this reason, whatever you do, be sure to make a backup or copy of the file that you can revert to in case of error. Good luck.