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Batch Change "Action" of 401k Transactions from "Bought" to "Added"

zlx

I recently downloaded my 401k transactions from Fidelity NetBenefits, and it seems Quicken treated all contributions as stock purchase, and assumed I paid cash for these purchases. It seems to me the most straightforward way to fix would be change "Action" of these transactions from "Bought" to "Added" so they don't need any cash. I have two related questions:

1. Is it the right way to do?
2. If yes, how can I batch change all transactions?

Thanks.

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Accepted answers

zlx

Thanks for your screenshot. Since I have ~200 transactions and manual change it not fast enough, I finally figured out a way to batch change all transactions..

In case other people have same question as me. Here is how I did. You will need to know how to use multi-line editing feature in your favorite editors (I used VSCode).

The ideas is to download QIF file from Fidelity website and manually edit it. There are a few items you need to change.

1. Find all occurrences of `MDividends` and `MContribution`.
2. Add a line below it as `L[YOUR_401K_ACCOUNT_NAME]`
3. Copy the line starting with `U`, paste it under `L` line and change first character to `$` sign.
4. Change `NBuy` to `NBuyX`

At the end all sections should be something like in the screenshot below.

Note that you should not change `MExchanges` events. Multi-line editing is very handy here since you can change all transactions at once. You might also want to refer to QIF format in case you have other events that I didn't mention here.

QIF Format Link: https://stuff.mit.edu/afs/sipb/project/gnucash/1.6.4/arch/sun4x_58/share/gnome/help/gnucash/C/intro.html

All comments

Sherlock

Normally, the purchases made in the account should be paid for with cash from employer and employee contributions and interest, dividend, and gain distributions.

If you're not going to provide the cash, than changing the Bought action transactions to BoughtX action transactions referencing the 401k account should resolve the cash for the purchase. Unfortunately, the only way to apply these changes is one transaction at a time.

If you don't mind losing the historical performance, you can covert all the holdings into Added transactions for each lot with the correct cost basis using Shares Transferred Between Accounts wizard and delete all the earlier transactions using the Edit Multiple Transactions wizard.

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

zlx

Thanks for your reply. After I change "Bought" to "BoughtX" and reference the 401k account itself, the cash is still taken from the account for the purchase, and as a result net worth of the account is still 0.

Sherlock

zlx said:

Thanks for your reply. After I change "Bought" to "BoughtX" and reference the 401k account itself, the cash is still taken from the account for the purchase, and as a result net worth of the account is still 0.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words...

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/6031128/uploads/editor/73/vtcw0a8cq4ts.png

zlx