Investment transactions assigned to wrong accounts

Cec Britton
Cec Britton Member ✭✭
edited May 2021 in Investing (Windows)
05/19/2021
Quicken Support:
I have in my Quicken file, three Vanguard Investment accounts. Two of those accounts are tax free IRA accounts and the third is a fully taxable personal account. Because I am well over 70 years of age I have for a good amount of time being taking Required Minimum Distributions (RMD) each year on the two IRA accounts and paying Federal and State income taxes on them. For a long time I took my RMD at year end in a lump sum and paid taxes at the time. For the last two years I have taken monthly distributions and paid the required taxes at that time.

Since I started taking the distributions monthly, I have encountered a strange problem with the downloaded data. Now, I am tired of having to correct this “mess” each month and coming to you for help. In describing the problem, I am going to refer to the two IRA accounts as accounts A and B and the taxable account as account C.

Ideally, the mutual fund shares I am selling are from accounts A & B; the sales total has taxes withheld and the remaining cash is deposited in a bank savings account electronically each month.

Realistically that is not happening in Quicken. For some reason Quicken is showing that the sale of shares took place in accounts A & C. Obviously, the sale reported in account A is correct but the sale of shares from account C is not; I am not selling shares from that account because I’m have no need to do so and it is not required. To make matters worse, Quicken is reporting a sale of mutual fund shares in account C that simply don’t exist there. That makes it impossible for me to simply transfer records between accounts because the shares just don’t exist in the “from” account. I will happily provide more information if needed to help me correct this problem.

Cecil Britton, Sierra Vista, AZ

Best Answer

  • Cec Britton
    Cec Britton Member ✭✭
    Answer ✓
    Thanks a million to Lurker and Jim Harman for the excellent help you rendered. Now my problems are resolved. You are a real asset to this forum.

Answers

  • q_lurker
    q_lurker SuperUser ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited May 2021
    I suspect you have the Vanguard accounts mapped to the wrong Quicken accounts (B mapped to C, C mapped to B ).  Along with that premise, I suspect you do not have Quicken setup to compare the holdings (Quicken vs Vanguard) for those mismatched accounts.  If that is the case, it would be that not only are the withdrawals wrong, but also monthly, quarterly, or annual distributions of all funds in Accounts B and C are also wrong.  Is that the case?  You might also go to Tools / Online Center / for Vanguard and the two accounts and there click the Compare to Portfolio button for further confirmation.  

    If my premise is correct, for those two accounts, you need to Edit the account details, Online Services; Deactivate the current service.  After both are deactivated you can then reinitiate the online connection.  

        
  • Jim_Harman
    Jim_Harman SuperUser ✭✭✭✭✭
    Following on @q_lurker's procedure, when you re-activate the online connections, you will be presented with the opportunity to link your accounts. Be sure you link the Vanguard accounts to the correct Quicken accounts (not add).
    QWin Premier subscription
  • Cec Britton
    Cec Britton Member ✭✭
    Thanks to both of you for the good, intelligent answers to my question. I am only a casual user of Quicken but I've used it since Microsoft retired it's Money application. You are introducing me to features of Quicken I have never had any reason to investigate. I have only delved into Quicken as far as I needed to for my limited purposes. I did take a look at the comparison of my accounts contents on Quicken versus what Vanguard is showing and I saw some big disconnects in data. Now I must do some reading so I can follow the steps suggested by Lurker to reset and correct my account connections. To be honest I'm going to have to look at "Help" in order to find how to follow the directions in: "If my premise is correct, for those two accounts, you need to Edit the account details, Online Services; Deactivate the current service. After both are deactivated you can then reinitiate the online connection." I will keep you advised of my progress.
  • Cec Britton
    Cec Britton Member ✭✭
    Okay, I checked the setup for all 3 mutual fund accounts. I did find that the problem IRA account had the wrong Vanguard account number listed so I corrected that. Next I deactivated all 3 accounts and restarted Quicken. I started the reactivation process with the taxable investment account. Everything was fine and Quicken found all 3 accounts I selected the single taxable account and as warned by Mr. Harman, I changed "Add" to Link. When I hit the "Next" button, Quicken added two new IRA accounts to the mix, leaving the originals intact. Now i have duplicate IRA accounts and the one single taxable account. I don't know where I went wrong but I assume that the next step is to just delete the old IRA account entries that Quicken duplicated for me. Thankfully, Quicken named the duplicates differently by replacing the front end of the account numbers with XXX. I'm holding off doing anything until I hear from my gurus.
  • q_lurker
    q_lurker SuperUser ✭✭✭✭✭
    When you are reconnecting the accounts with Vanguard, you are doing all three accounts.  As I recall, the options are Add, Link, and Ignore for each one separately.  You switched the one to Link, but not the other two. 

    I would either restore the backup you made and redo the three, or delete the newly created IRA account and reconnect with Vanguard for the latter two.       
  • Cec Britton
    Cec Britton Member ✭✭
    Answer ✓
    Thanks a million to Lurker and Jim Harman for the excellent help you rendered. Now my problems are resolved. You are a real asset to this forum.