Why does the brokerage balance not match?

ranamaska

pics attached

ranamaska

better view of Q

jacobs

Thanks for the screen shots. I  can now finally fully understand what you're seeing and why it's problematic:



Shares of stock is part of an individual company; a unit in the financial world is a combination of assets or types of assets packaged together and sold as one. (For example, a shareholder buying one unit of company stock may get preferred shares, ordinary shares and/or warrants in the unit).

It seems like the problem must be in how Principal is providing data to Quicken. Quicken -- and the QFX standard for securities -- doesn't provide separately for units and shares. If you were entering this manually, I'd tell you to stick to the shares and share price and ignore the units. But it sounds like Principal is downloading the number of units transacted while Quicken is pulling in the share price for  HII.

What to do? First, drill down in Principal to see if you can see if it shows your holding as HII, or if there is a different symbol for the Unit Trust. If there's a different symbol for the Unit Trust which is publicly traded, then switching to that symbol in Quicken will pull in the Unit price. But if there's not a separate symbol for the Unit Trust, not seems to me you have three options:

1. Work with Principal support to get them to understand they are downloading incorrect information to Quicken.
2. Manually correct and enter the number of shares in Quicken to be the share total, not the Unit Trust total. Then the math will work.
3. Manually correct and enter the share price information to be the Unit price rather than the HII share price. Then the math will work.

I'm not too familiar with holding Unit Trusts, but I believe I've described this correctly; hopefully someone else will jump in if I'm not explaining it exactly right.

ranamaska

"What to do?"
#1 - I am trying to get them to understand.
#2 - How / where to manually correct & enter number of shares
#3 - How / where to manually correct & enter share price ( may not need to do this as it has been correct so far).

jacobs

ranamaska said:

#2 - How / where to manually correct & enter number of shares

Click on the Principal account in your sidebar, click to the Transactions tab, and in the Search box, enter "Huntington" to filter just the transactions in the account for this security. If there are only a few, it may pay to edit each of these transactions to have the correct number of shares. If there are a lot, you may want to instead create an Add Shares or Remove Shares transaction to adjust the number of share to what you actually have.

ranamaska said:

#3 - How / where to manually correct & enter share price ( may not need to do this as it has been correct so far).

Click on the Portfolio tab, Group by Security, and click on the Huntington link. (Alternatively, go to Window > Securities and click on Huntington). Click Edit Security, and then Price History. Here you can view the entire price history Quicken has for this security. you can edit the value for existing dates or enter new values here.

Chris_QPW

Just a couple notes.  Units instead of Shares is very common in 401K accounts.
Second, Quicken is suppose to get prices from three different sources.

1. From the financial institution.
2. From the third party quote service.
3. From manual input.

What appears to be happening is that Quicken Mac (and probably Quicken Windows) sees that "security name" and matches it with "stock" and as such puts in the symbol for the third party quote service to download that price.  #2 overrides #1 if available.  And that causes the problem you are seeing.

I'm sure if you looked in the OFX data you would find that the financial institution did download the correct price for per unit, but it is #2 that is overriding this messing things up.

In Quicken Windows it is possible to tell it not to match the downloaded security and to leave the symbol blank so that the third party quote server won't provide quotes that override what the financial institution sends.

If I remember correctly Quicken Mac has what I consider a bug where there isn't any way to tell it not match the security/use the third party service quote.  This is a perfect example of why Quicken Mac shouldn't do it that way.

ranamaska

Jacobs - I followed your directions for #2, But there no way to change the number of shares. #3 doesnot need editing so far.

ranamaska

Chris_QPW - thanks for the info. I am a Q- Mac user.
The price per "share" has been correct. The number of items being held they call "units/shares" is called "shares" in Quicken. That number is incorrectly downloading. So, How do I look at the QFX data without downloading it into Quicken? Will there be any thought to correcting that bug you spoke of?

ranamaska

I heard back from Principal today. "They do not have a problem on their end. They are not able to change the way the data downloads to Quicken. That is a Quicken problem."

jacobs

The question is whether you are trying to get your holdings in Quicken to be the share total, because Quicken is downloading the share price... or to get the prices in Quicken to be the unit price, because Quicken is downloading the transactions in units. You're going have to edit one or the other, from what I understand. 

Chris_QPW

ranamaska said:

Chris_QPW - thanks for the info. I am a Q- Mac user.
The price per "share" has been correct. The number of items being held they call "units/shares" is called "shares" in Quicken. That number is incorrectly downloading. So, How do I look at the QFX data without downloading it into Quicken? Will there be any thought to correcting that bug you spoke of?

1. The fact that it is called shares in Quicken isn't really important.  It is like complaining that they call a field Payee whereas someone else might call it Description.   The important part is that everything stay consistent.  If they are sending "units" then the price needs to be in units.  And since Quicken's third party quote service is the price of shares for a given security, then it can't be used if units are what this security is being reported in.  Note this should be in the exact same as what is on the financial institution's statements/website.  They certainly shouldn't be showing you shares with the public price for those shares when they are in turn sending the information to Quicken in units (and price per unit) with the "private price".
2. To look at the contents of the QFX data you should be able to look at the OFX log.  @jacobs can point you to that in Quicken Mac(I'm a Quicken Windows user). I will give examples of transactions and the price information below.
3. As for the problem in Quicken Mac it is the fact that you can't turn off the incorrect quote from the third party service. It insists on putting the price per share of the security it matched, even though in reality it isn't a match.  The Public security is with the same name is priced in shares not units.  I no idea if the Quicken development team will fix this problem or not.

At this point personally I think the only thing you can do is stop downloading transactions and enter them manually.  The reason is simple, yes you can do as @jacobs suggested and change either the units or the price, but that won't "hold".  If you change the price because that security is "connected" the next day the third party quote service is going to download a new price and overwrite your manual entry.  If you change the number units to what it would be in shares, then the next buy or sell will have to be corrected too.

Example of a mutual fund by (Note in OFX format there isn't anything called "shares" it is "units" which means whatever the security happens to use).

                    <BUYMF>

                        <INVBUY>

                            <INVTRAN>

                                <FITID>230590534

                                <DTTRADE>20100923160000.000[-5:EST]

                                <DTSETTLE>20100924160000.000[-5:EST]

                                <MEMO>BUY

                            </INVTRAN>

                            <SECID>

                                <UNIQUEID>461418691

                                <UNIQUEIDTYPE>CUSIP

                            </SECID>

                            <UNITS>97.276

                            <UNITPRICE>10.2800279

                            <TOTAL>-1000.0

                            <SUBACCTSEC>CASH

                            <SUBACCTFUND>CASH

                        </INVBUY>

                        <BUYTYPE>BUY

                    </BUYMF>

Then the QFX data has a "summary" at the end with all your positions and their prices and such:

            <MFINFO>

                <SECINFO>

                    <SECID>

                        <UNIQUEID>921935201

                        <UNIQUEIDTYPE>CUSIP

                    </SECID>

                    <SECNAME>Vanguard Wellington Fund Admiral Shares

                    <TICKER>VWENX

                    <FIID>0521

                    <UNITPRICE>55.76

                    <MEMO>Price as of date based on closing price

                </SECINFO>

                <MFTYPE>OPENEND

            </MFINFO>

 
Note that I'm using a formatter here your data might all be on one line.

ranamaska

Thanks again to all for the info,
problem will be solved when I rollover the account.
then i can say i have no principal.

ranamaska

NEW posting from Principal website >>

Effective June 1, 2021, we updated our Quicken® download system. Please run your back-up process within Quicken prior to downloading a new file from our website. Review the Quicken Web Connect conversion instructions for more information.
Due to these changes, Quicken may not recognize previously downloaded transactions. In order to avoid downloading duplicate transactions, please download custom dates beginning with the day following your last transaction.

Chris_QPW

@ranamaska doesn't really sound like anything to do with what you are facing.  It sounds like what happened is they changed the way they generate the unique Ids that Quicken uses to tell if a transaction is the same or not.  The only result would be as they said, duplicate transactions showing up in Quicken.