Investment accounts - cash and placeholder entries

grwkak

Migrating to Quicken and have been adding investment accounts - Fidelity 401K and other Fidelity accounts. I have done this a couple of ways. One by connecting and enabling simplified tracking the other in another file and also tracking transactions (detailed tracking).

With simplified tracking, I end up with an additional cash entry that doubles the size of the investment account value. Can I safely set this to zero?

With the more detailed approach, I have placeholder entries for missing transactions - I read the instructions but not clear on what to do. I see a list with an enter cost link - what do I enter - the price of the investment on that date? It is really not clear.

Guy

Tom Young

I can't help you with the "simplified" tracking issue.  It's something I have never used, and probably never will.

As to the detailed approach, you probably understand that your current position in a given security in a given account is the sum of all the transactions involving that security since the first Buy, up until "today." 

When you first establish that Account in Quicken and do your first download of transactions, you may not receive every single transaction for that security.  That is the transactions available for downloading into Quicken might not stretch back to that first Buy.  (The transactions available for downloading is set by the Financial Institution, (FI), not by Quicken.) If that happens then the number of shares of that security that you own as calculated by Quicken and the cost of those shares won't agree to the number of shares and their cost as calculated by the FI. 

One of the pieces of data included in the download from the FI is the number of shares that you own as of the time of the download.  If the number of shares per the FI doesn't agree to the number of shares per Quicken, then Quicken proposes a Placeholder where you can enter the number of "missing" shares and the cost of those shares.  If you enter these items correctly then the number of shares and the overall basis for those shares should agree to the FI's numbers, assuming the FI has been tracking basis since that first Buy, which might not be the case.  But of course what will be missing in your Quicken Account is accurate lot-by-lot basis and holding period.

You don't have to accept a Placeholder of course.  You could build up your holdings in the security by going back and manually entering all of the missing transactions, you could do Add actions for each lot, or simply do two Adds, one for short term holdings and one for long term holdings, or some other variation on this theme. 

The Placeholder is asking for "basis", i.e., the original cost of the missing shares.  If your FI has an accurate basis for a given security you could simply calculate the difference between Quicken's figure for basis, (as calculated by the transactions downloaded), and the FI's basis number, and plug that into the Placeholder, should you decide to go that route.

grwkak

Thanks! I was beginning to suspect something like this after clicking through some of the placeholders. Some funds I have owned for years so adding all transactions is not very practical. Let me look at what I have and see if I can follow some of your other suggestions. It's kind of why I am looking at both the simplified and detailed approach!!!

grwkak

Can I just leave the placeholder alone and build history over time. I am more interested in current value.

Tom Young

To get "current values" correctly stated you must have the number of shares correctly stated and the amount of cash correctly stated in you have a cash placeholder.  If you accept the Placeholders and get the number of shares properly stated you should have a good current value.

grwkak

Thanks for that feedback. It seems to work. Interesting thing is that Fidelity seems to include some sort of cash balance in the download when you set up these accounts in Quicken for the first time. Its easier to address using the more detailed tracking than simplified.