How do I replace a "Shares added" entry with a placeholder

tmctague

Hi - I started using Quicken last year and entered my stock holdings as of 12/31/2019. Somehow at that time one of the securities was entered as a Shares Added transaction, and so the value of the shares affected the cash balance reflected in my account. How can I remove this Shares Added transaction and replace it with a simple placeholder for the shares held at 12/31/2019?

Chris_QPW

Select Enter Transaction and use the Adjust Share Balance action.

Chris_QPW

P.S. Add Shares doesn't affect the cash balance.  Something else must be going on.

Tom Young

"Somehow at that time one of the securities was entered as a Shares Added transaction, and so the value of the shares affected the cash balance reflected in my account. "

As @Chris_QPW said, an Add shares action does not affect cash.  It's an entry that "magically" puts stock into an Account without affecting any other visible Account in the file.  It's kinda' like your rich uncle gifted you 1,000 shares of Apple and told his broker to transfer those shares into your brokerage account.  Yesterday those shares weren't in your account, today they are.

I don't know why you think a "simple placeholder" will fix things, because it won't.  If the problem is that the Add shares didn't affect cash - cash is overstated in your Account - then replace that Add shares with a Buy to consume the cash.

More detail is needed here.

tmctague

Thanks for the feedback.

The Shares Added *did* actually appear to affect the cash balance; see screenshot. A number of other securities were set up in this account at the same time, but they went in as placeholders and did not affect my cash balance. I don't know why this one was different but now would like to align it with the others. Note: I don't want to adjust the share balance because (a) it was fine and (b) the security has since been sold.

Tom Young

"The Shares Added *did* actually appear to affect the cash balance;"

No, it didn't.  What you're seeing is an artifact of how Quicken, internally, makes such an entry but you'll notice with this example

that the actual cash balance in the Account - that's the far right column, a column you omitted - did not change.  The cash balance was $0 before the Added transaction, it's still $0 after the added transaction.

IF the Added transaction was correct - proper number of shares, proper cost, proper acquired date - THEN it's a perfectly good and valid entry UNLESS it should have been a Bought transaction and the cash in the Account is overstated because of that.  It puts the security into your Account and the security needs to be in your Account so you can later sell the stock, which you've done. 

I wouldn't worry because it isn't a placeholder, at this point that's a "style point" not a real accounting problem.  As I understand it placeholders are entered into the transaction list when the number of shares of a particular security doesn't match the number of shares downloaded from a financial institution.  You then are prompted to enter the missing cost basis numbers, effectively turning that placeholder into an Added transaction.  (This is all theory to me, since I've never had a placeholder in my Accounts.) 

Jim_Harman

Your snippet doesn't show what the effect was on the cash balance. Either you did not show the cash balance, which is the last column in the transaction list, or the account has a linked checking account and the cash is shown there.

tmctague

I stand corrected - I didn't realize there was another column to the right, as the register is truncated on my screen. Thank you, gentlemen.

UKR

Please try to reduce column widths in the register views to make the entire line fit within the window. (The Description column has a required minimum width which you cannot shrink further)

I assume your Quicken window is already as wide as your monitor allows.
You can temporarily turn off the Account Bar to make more space available for the register portion of the view. Press the F11 - key to toggle "full screen view mode" on or off.

Users of the latest Quicken Subscription version can now also choose different font types and sizes for investment register views, same as you have always been able to do with banking registers.  Use the Fonts button in Edit / Preferences / Registers to select a different font for your register view (applies to both bank and investment registers at the same time).

Tom Young

Tom Young said:

 "As I understand it placeholders are entered into the transaction list when the number of shares of a particular security doesn't match the number of shares downloaded from a financial institution." 

Since I've never messed around with placeholders I omitted another way that placeholders can be created, and that's by setting up a manual (non-downloading) Investment Account and as part of the setup telling Quicken about the number of shares for each security that are in the Account.  This "up front" info has no detail - in particular, no cost basis - so Quicken creates a placeholder in the Account to be edited by you to get the cost basis correct.