How to change the financial institution associated with an investment account

peterfnyc

I moved one of my accounts to Schwab. I don't want to lose the history, so I'd like to just change the institution for online updates, instead of creating a new account in Quicken. It looks like I can change many things about an account after it has been established in Quicken, but I don't see a way to change the brokerage firm. Has anyone done this?

crwalejr

Save a backup of your data.  Go to the account you want to change and go to account details in the dropdown box. click the Online Services tab and deactivate the account. Click the General tab and delete any information in Account Number and Customer ID boxes.  Now set up online services with your Schwab account.  I have never done this but it should work.  My only concern is that all of the data from the previous brokerage firm is not in the new Schwab account and I am not sure how Quicken will reconcile this.  It may not be an issue.  Give it a whirl.  If it doesn't work you can easily restore the data file.

Tom Young

"My only concern is that all of the data from the previous brokerage firm is not in the new Schwab account and I am not sure how Quicken will reconcile this. "

All the data (transactions) that occurred when the securities were with the old broker will be in what is now called the "Schwab" Account; all that should change is the broker's name and the account number.  When connected to Schwab for the first time you should receive a series of "Add" actions.  If all the securities and cash transferred "intact" from the old broker to the new broker you can delete these Adds.

peterfnyc

Thank you both for this suggestion.

I tried this before posting the issue because it seemed like the logical way to do this. For some reason, Quicken doesn’t want to forget the name of the financial institution when I deactivate it. When I then try to re-establish an online connection, it asks me for the “new” user id and password from the same brokerage firm.

I wasn’t worried about the reconciliation since all I had to do was ignore the handful of “adds” that Schwab showed as a result of the transfer. After that, new transactions would simply be added to the old account.

If you have any other ideas, I’d really appreciate hearing them.
Thanks.
Peter

jrich75

crwalejr said:

Click the General tab and delete any information in Account Number and Customer ID boxes.  

 Did you do this after deactivating? Also delete the name of the original brokerage.  I also understand it is good to restart Quicken before attempting to re-activate the account through Schwab.  As you note, the goal is to get Quicken to forget the original financial institution associated with the account.

peterfnyc

The restart did the trick. I had to do a couple of restarts, one after deactivating, and one other time after re-activating. It worked like a charm. Thank you thank you!

Ps56k2

yeah - it seems that Quicken sometimes has a memory cache of account info - even after changes made -
and a close/open/restart may flush the cache and make things normal.