Merging Investment Accounts

pactaz

I've not had any luck with this one whatsoever. Under "Investing" and then the sub category "Retirement" accounts I have two accounts I want to merge. One has a title of "401(k) xxxxx" and the other has a different name say "vvvvv." The 401(k) has transactions from 2018 and the other account has transactions from 2013 to 2018--all the same funds from the same mutual fund family. I've tried making a separate file with just the vvvvv account and importing that but no joy. You can't select a transaction and drag and drop it from yyyyy into the xxxxx account. I've tried drilling down into the "more info" of an individual transaction but still no joy. None of the transactions are duplicates and I'd really just like to have all the same account info in the same tab with all the Gain/Loss presented for one account vs two. Anyone have any ideas or fixes? Thanks!

jacobs

I replied in another thread where you posted a similar question, but in the interest of getting int from others who may have done this, here's what I posted in the other thread:

You can't just move transactions around, because with investments, the order and type of transactions affects. (Picture if you had an account the transactions for security X over a period of time, and you were able to just move in a copy for a share split somewhere int he middle of the time period -- that would affect everything which followed, and would be difficult for the program to know which values to change or not.)

So the only thing you can really do to maintain historical accuracy is to move shares out of one account and move them into the new account, meticulously, transaction after transaction. It's the only way to maintain the correct costs basis. Of course, if you have transactions going back long time, this could be tedious or too big a job to handle manually. So in version 5.11 back in 2019, the developers added some functionality to automate this process. From the release notes:

We've added a new feature that allows you to transfer one security or all your securities from one account to another. By using this feature, Quicken will automatically create Remove and Add Share transactions in the respective accounts and maintain the cost basis information from one account to the other. Add a transaction as you normally would in your investment account and select Transfer Shares in the transaction type to start the process or click on the Transfer Shares button in the Remove Shares form.

I definitely suggest you make a copy of your Quicken data file before you start this, in case things get messed up along the way. 

jacobs

I replied in another thread where you posted a similar question, but in the interest of getting int from others who may have done this, here's what I posted in the other thread:

You can't just move transactions around, because with investments, the order and type of transactions affects. (Picture if you had an account the transactions for security X over a period of time, and you were able to just move in a copy for a share split somewhere int he middle of the time period -- that would affect everything which followed, and would be difficult for the program to know which values to change or not.)

So the only thing you can really do to maintain historical accuracy is to move shares out of one account and move them into the new account, meticulously, transaction after transaction. It's the only way to maintain the correct costs basis. Of course, if you have transactions going back long time, this could be tedious or too big a job to handle manually. So in version 5.11 back in 2019, the developers added some functionality to automate this process. From the release notes:

We've added a new feature that allows you to transfer one security or all your securities from one account to another. By using this feature, Quicken will automatically create Remove and Add Share transactions in the respective accounts and maintain the cost basis information from one account to the other. Add a transaction as you normally would in your investment account and select Transfer Shares in the transaction type to start the process or click on the Transfer Shares button in the Remove Shares form.

I definitely suggest you make a copy of your Quicken data file before you start this, in case things get messed up along the way. 

pactaz

@jacobs I'll give it a go and see how it turns out. Thanks!!