Quicken Portfolio Not Matching Brokerage Statement

Jim_Harman

Placeholders force the number of shares in Quicken to match the number reported by the FI. When a placeholder is zero, you should delete it. 

Are the 138 for small fractions of a share, or something more significant?

Sometimes you will get a placeholder for something like .0012 share. That is usually caused by a rounding difference in a reinvested dividend or something like that. You can fix that by going to the previous transaction for the affected security and adjusting the number of shares but not the total cost to make the Placeholder zero. Let Quicken recompute the price per share, which should not change much. When the Placeholder is zero, delete it.

Other times the placeholder will be for a much larger number of shares. This can be caused by mismatched securities, or missing or duplicate transactions. if it is a duplicate for the number of shares in the placeholder, delete the duplicate then the Placeholder will be zero and you can delete it. Mismatches you will have to resolve as I described earlier.

If you have missing Bought or Sold transactions that affect your cash balance, you must note the number of shares in the Placeholder and delete it, then enter the missing transactions and deal with the cash balance separately.

For some reason Quicken will not let you enter a transaction that affects the cash balance if there is a Placeholder for that security at a later date, which is why you need to delete the placeholder first in this case. I wish it did not do that.

As always when changing historical transactions, back up your data file first, in case things get worse and not better.

Tom Young

"I have my wife's TDA statement tied to Quicken to the penny!" and " My wife's account shows that 138 [placeholders] still remain!"

I would guess that what you're saying here is that the "Market Value" total shown in the Holdings window agrees to the TDA's number.  But from an accounting standpoint there's another number that should also be in agreement with TDA and that number is the total "Cost Basis."  Do those numbers agree?

Placeholders simply strive to get the number of shares shown in Quicken to agree to the number of shares TDA says you own.  So if TDA says you own 121 shares of "X" but Quicken's records only add up to 120 shares of X the placeholder - if you accept it - adds one more share of X into Quicken.  But the placeholder doesn't know how much that missing share costs and asks you to fill in the missing cost.

To re-emphasize what @Jim_Harman is saying, you need to work through your placeholders and determine why each placeholder was entered into your transaction list.  Having determined the "why" you then either correct some previous transaction or make an entry if a transaction is missing.

Since you're down to three placeholders in your own Account I'd suggest you start your investigation there.

gksmith5

It seems like my problems and questions never end! I reviewed the cost basis of my wife's account and it is exact except for two securities, for which the basis was off only a few $'s (less than .2%). So, I thought I would clean up the account by deleting all of the placeholders, since I still could not make heads or tails of them. Many if not most of the placeholder names began with "Duplicated" and when clicking on them and I could not do anything. Since I had already manually eliminated the duplications, I thought it best to Delete All Placeholders. Fortunately I DID do a backup before doing this.

I don't have placeholders now! BUT I now have new entries in the Security Holding report for the account. They all relate to Vanguard securities. I renamed all of my securities per Jim's suggestion by adding the stock symbol to the beginning of the names of all my securities. But many of the new securities that now show in the Holdings Report show Vanguard securities without the stock symbol prefix. One says "DuplcatedVANGUARD GROWTH...". A couple show the Vanguard security as renamed. Several show no market value, but all show a number of shares. One security shows negative shares and negative market value. There are 10 of these erroneous securities showing in the report.

The other securities in the report are the same as before. I verified that the total of the new erroneous security values match the deviation between the two account totals.

As previously stated, I can restore from my backup, but does this mean I have to keep the placeholders for ever? Or do I have to trace down the causes of these placeholders and resolve them? As I also stated, even with your help, I have not been able to resolve any placeholders, so I am missing something! What do I do next?

Thank you for your patience!

Jim_Harman

" does this mean I have to keep the placeholders for ever? Or do I have to trace down the causes of these placeholders and resolve them? "

No, it means you should not delete them all willy-nilly. You need to understand the cause of each one and resolve the cause as I described above. You should start by restoring the backup. so the Placeholders are back in place.

I recommend you start with the account that only has a few placeholders and work on the earliest one first. After you have done a few you should start to see patterns and it will go faster. 

Going forward, you should NEVER allow Quicken to create placeholders. When you see the Mismatch dialog at the end of a download session, you should note down the discrepancy(s) then exit the dialog. After fixing the problems, you can go to the gear menu and select Reconcile shares and it should say there is no discrepancy. 

Chris_QPW

gksmith5 said:

I will stop using the cloud for my active Quicken data. The cloud is really handy to use, though. What do you think of the cloud as a backup place for the data? I know that security is a concern, but the data is not something that I just ignore. But it would be a source of identity theft.

I don't think this question got addressed.

Sync to Mobile/Web isn't a backup.  It is a partial copy of your data used for allowing Mobile/Web to present that data to you.

As for "real backups" as in the full copy of your data file, you certainly can backup your data file to one of the "cloud services" like OneDrive, Dropbox, ...  It is just a matter of pointing the backup to a sub folder in one of these services' "folder".  Like in: C:\Users\USERNAME\Dropbox\Quicken

Jim_Harman

I agree it is fine to use Dropbox or whatever to store backups. You should just not store your working data file there.

gksmith5

I am getting closer to solving my quandary. I have successfully found the causes of the placeholders in my account by stumbling about, and I am beginning to get a grasp of the situation. Now I want to attempt getting rid of the placeholders in my wife's account. I feel that this might take different methods to accomplish.

There are 137 placeholders in her account. All of them range in date from Oct 2016 to Sept 2017, for which I do not have the TDA statements saved, Furthermore, all of the placeholders deal with securities that are no longer held. However, when I attempted to delete the placeholders, all of these securities reappeared, many with zero value, but several with market value. All of the securities had a share balance. One also had negative share and market value, which I believe I understand why. Several of the placeholders indicated that they were duplicate entries, but I had previously deleted all of the duplicate entries in order to get the Holdings to tie to the TDA statement.

So now, how do I handle this situation since it is impossible to go back and correct the history as I did for my account? I really don't want to always see the message of 137 placeholders whenever I go to the account.

jwkitz

I have also had the problem with my TDA accounts not matching with Q for the last 3 months. I have used the reconcile function to balance my accounts for years. I do this on my cash balance with the added benefit that any transactions (buy/sell/div) reconcile as well. I have ended up with placeholder transactions due to inequities in cash balance while share balances are spot on.

Chris_QPW

jwkitz said:

I have also had the problem with my TDA accounts not matching with Q for the last 3 months. I have used the reconcile function to balance my accounts for years. 

In an investment account using the reconcile feature isn't adequate for reconciling an investment account.
It is a cash only reconcile.

One must first ensure that the number of shares for every security is first correct, and then the cash reconcile can be done.  If the number of shares for a given security is wrong you have to first correct that problem.

jwkitz said:

I have ended up with placeholder transactions due to inequities in cash balance while share balances are spot on.

Placeholders do not affect the cash balance.

The reason you get a request to put a placeholder in your account is because of a difference between number of shares in a security in your Quicken account and the number of shares that the financial institution said that security has in the downloaded transactions data.

If you select the gear icon menu in the upper right of the investment account you can select Reconcile shares.  This will do a comparison of what the financial institution sent and what is in Quicken.  If there is a difference you can select the Details button to have it show a dialog that allows entering a placeholder.

This compare is normally done after every download, and that is why you might get placeholders in your account.

Placeholders "correct" the number of shares, but they do it by just changing the number of shares, not by correction whatever caused the difference.  The difference can be caused by an incorrect transaction(s) or it can even be caused by the fact that the information that the financial institution sent down for how many shares you have of a given security is wrong (yes this does happen).

If you do a normal reconcile in an non investment account and it doesn't balance, Quicken will suggest entering a balance adjustment (this is the cash reconcile, and is the same reconcile in an investment account). Clearly if you allow a balance adjustment into the register you are saying you give up on finding out why there is a difference and just put in this adjustment.

A Placeholder is the same except for securities.

So in a problem free investment account there shouldn't be any placeholders.  With one possible exception.  Just like you have an opening balance, you can start out with securities that you don't know the history for, and as such have placeholders for them.  But a much better approach even for these would be to change them into buys with the average price of whatever you own of them at the time for the cost basis.

Note if you find that the financial institution's information downloaded is incorrect, then you need to ignore it and instead reconcile the number of shares to what is known to be the right amount.  As in look at the number of shares for each security either in the Holdings or the Investing -> Portfolio for a given date and make sure they are correct.

Also make sure you have this option on so that you can see the placeholders in the account.


Note that if you find that a given financial institution is consistently sending the wrong share information and the compare after the downloading is bothering your/putting placeholders in your account you can turn off the compare per account:


But if you do this you need to make sure you do that share comparison yourself on a regular basis and before you do the cash reconcile.