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Why can't Quicken give me the correct sum of numbers showing in a report?

NebularNovice

I have modified the Tax Summary report to include calendar year 2020 and one brokerage account. That selection almost works, but there are two problems:

1. 23 lines show up in _DivInc. 21 of them are the correct dividends for that account. The last two are from an account "Tax Impact of 401(k) Accounts" I assume that's something that Quicken generates, but have no idea why it appears when I have cleared selection of all accounts except the one brokerage account. I'm not sure these entries are affecting my total because the amounts shown for them are both 0.

2. The more important issue. The total shown for _DivInc in the report is $1902, but adding the 23 lines gives me $5571. That's a pretty big rounding error!

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Accepted answers

Sherlock

The report should show the _401Contrib transactions in the special built-in Tax Impact of 401(k) Accounts account because the account is included in the report. If you do not want the transactions from this account to be included, open the report, press Alt + C, select the Accounts tab, uncheck Tax Impact of 401(k) Accounts, and select OK.

If there are _DivInc transactions in the special built-in Tax Impact of 401(k) Accounts account, the Quicken file is corrupt. You may want to review: https://www.quicken.com/support/advanced-data-file-troubleshooting-correct-problems-quicken-windows

If the issue persists:

First, save a backup (press Ctrl + B).

One way to access the special Tax Impact of 401(k) Accounts register is to create a temporary transaction in an account with the category: [Tax Impact of 401(k) Accounts], right-click on the transaction and select Go To matching transfer. You should then able to delete the erroneous _DivInc transactions.

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Sherlock

NebularNovice

I couldn't uncheck the tax impact account because I couldn't see it. It was hidden. When I checked Show hidden accounts, I could see it -- and a bunch of other hidden accounts which were checked. I applied Clear All again to get rid of all of them.

I have no idea why all the hidden accounts were left checked when I pressed Clear All. I would think Clear All should mean all accounts, whether I can see them or not.

Once those two transactions were removed (by removing the hidden account from the report), the report shows the correct sum. The transaction amounts for those transactions showed on the report as zero so I don't know why including them messed up the total.

Thanks for reminding me how to access the hidden account. The transactions were two copies of a reinvested dividend in one of my TIAA funds, dated 10/30/20. I removed them (and one other bogus entry 10+ years ago).

I had done a file validation run earlier while I was trying to figure this out. Nothing noteworthy showed up, certainly nothing related to these transactions. Since I have now removed them, even though Quicken doesn't actually Clear All accounts when I tell it to, those transactions won't show up in my reports.

Thanks for your help.

Sherlock

NebularNovice said:

I couldn't uncheck the tax impact account because I couldn't see it. It was hidden. When I checked Show hidden accounts, I could see it -- and a bunch of other hidden accounts which were checked. I applied Clear All again to get rid of all of them.

I have no idea why all the hidden accounts were left checked when I pressed Clear All. I would think Clear All should mean all accounts, whether I can see them or not.

Once those two transactions were removed (by removing the hidden account from the report), the report shows the correct sum. The transaction amounts for those transactions showed on the report as zero so I don't know why including them messed up the total.

Thanks for reminding me how to access the hidden account. The transactions were two copies of a reinvested dividend in one of my TIAA funds, dated 10/30/20. I removed them (and one other bogus entry 10+ years ago).

I had done a file validation run earlier while I was trying to figure this out. Nothing noteworthy showed up, certainly nothing related to these transactions. Since I have now removed them, even though Quicken doesn't actually Clear All accounts when I tell it to, those transactions won't show up in my reports.

Thanks for your help.

Interesting... The default Tax Impact of 401(k) Accounts account is not marked as hidden by default.

The Clear All and Mark All behavior of only clearing and marking the entries visible in the list is consistent across Quicken.

NebularNovice

I looked at the template Tax Summary report set up in Quicken Standard Reports in Reports & Graphs. Tax Impact is hidden there as well, so it is not a change I made when I adapted the template to my time period.

I found that Tax Impact is not a hidden account in the main Account List. It just doesn't appear there at all, even when Show hidden accounts is checked.

I can see that Mark All not marking hidden accounts might be preferable, but I can't see Clear All should leave hidden accounts marked. The best case could probably be make that hidden accounts should start out unchecked. I have difficulty envisioning a case where one would want to include hidden accounts in reports as a default action. Having that be the default in Quicken is more likely to create problems (as it did here) than most other defaults..

NebularNovice

After thinking some more about this, I realized that those bogus transactions in the hidden account were presumably messing up reports from the time they were created (2+ months ago). I just didn't see them until I ran a small version of one report and could see there was a problem.

They are no longer a problem because I deleted them, and that particular hidden account only has MiscExpX transactions that correspond to legitimate 401(k) (actually 403(b)7) transactions.

Next question: what other (probably hidden) accounts created by Quicken that I have barely heard of do I need to watch out for?

If I don't know which accounts to watch for or clean up, whenever I run a report, I might have to turn on hidden accounts, clear all, turn hidden accounts off, and mark the accounts I really want before I run the report. I would rather not have to do that.

Any hints on how to clean things up so I can have confidence in my reports would be appreciated.

I should note (again) that the bogus entries were not detected by File Validate.