Stock Spin-off - generates transactions in other investment accounts

Question

Hi, has anyone else experienced this problem, and is there any way to avoid it?
 - I have two investment accounts, each of which has some of the same stock.
 - One account was up-to-date,but I was playing catch-up (a few months behind) on one of the accounts.
 - The company spun off shares. This worked fine in the up-to-date account.  Everything reconciled in this account.
 - Entered the investment transactions in the other account, and performed the same spinoff (including using the temporary stock name).  
 - Found that, in addition to performing the split in this account, Quicken then added a new set of transactions for the split in the account I had already reconciled, throwing the holdings for the stock (original and new stock) out of whack.

Is this a bug?  Why is Quicken creating transactions in other investment accounts other than the one I'm working on?

Thx,
 DK.

Rocket J Squirrel · Accepted Answer

A spin-off, like a stock split, is a per-security event, not a per-account event.

Sherlock · Accepted Answer

The Corporate Securities Spin-Off wizard has no way of knowing you only want to record the spin-off in one account.  Normally, a spin-off should be applied to all holdings of a security.  It should be a simple matter of deleting the additional transactions and correcting the spun-off security.  If you want to avoid the issue in the future, you may enter the RtrnCap, MiscInc, and Added transactions directly yourself.

q_lurker · Accepted Answer

Or you should make sure all accounts are up-to-date with respect to that security when you first enter the Spinoff wizard.  Yes, it is by design that a spinoff in one account gets applied to all accounts holding that security at that time.