how to set up manual investment account - how to enter portfolio

pamela77

We have a retirement account at prudential that will not connect with quicken mac. How do I enter it manually? I don't see a way to add positions to the portfolio. I see a way to add transactions, but how do I enter the existing portfolio? I'd also like to show asset class distribution etc if possible.

Thank you,
Pamela

jacobs

@pamela77  I'm not sure I'm fully understanding your question, but I'll try to answer. You can add the securities you hold in Window > Securities. Then, you create an account, and start entering transactions. You can go back in time and enter your complete history, or you can just enter an "Add Shares" transaction to enter your shares for each security. Add Shares won't reduce the cash balance of your account, as would happen if you entered Buy transactions. Add Shares will ask you the cost of the shares you are adding. If you can see on Prudential's website what your cost/basis is, use that. If not, you can probably take a guess and not worry about it; because it's a retirement account, you're not really concerned with cost basis and gains, because when you withdraw money from the retirement account it will all be taxable income. 

When you create a new security, you can enter an asset class, but if it's a publicly traded security, Quicken will download the correct asset class or asset class breakdown. For example, if it's a balanced fund, it will download from Morningstar or whatever provider Quicken uses that the security is 61% large cap stocks, 38% domestic bonds, 1% cash. (Note that these asset allocations are currently used in the Dashboard view, but not in the Portfolio view sorted by asset class; that's a problem the developers have said they will be fixing in the future.)

And as long as the securities are publicly traded, and you enter their symbols, Quicken will download prices daily, so you don't need to update prices manually. If any of the securities are not tracked by Quicken, then you will have to enter prices manually whenever you want to see  up-to-date data.

jacobs

And if you get it set up, then it will all change as Prudential Retirement has been sold to Empower. 🤣

pamela77

Thank you RickO, I did try a few different financial institutions. We got to one where they sent a code via text. It allowed me to "add" the account, so it found it. Then when it tried to download transactions it failed. The first time it said something about multiple steps and just now it said "MFA failed FDP 3000 invalid credentials" and yet we log into the account online with the same credentials. I think there has been a known issue with prudential for a while but I don't know if it is still going on?

pamela77

Thank you Jacob, I didn't know about the window to add securities. That really helps. Several of the securities are institutional - they don't have a ticker. This is a deferred compensation plan and they have some of their own securities. So should I just add them myself?

jacobs

@pamela77 Yes, you can add institutional securities.

Enter the name and Type (Mutual Fund), and leave the Security field blank. Uncheck the box to "Use downloaded asset class information for this security".

If the fund is a mix of asset classes, select class = Mixture and a button will pop up to Edit Asset Mixture, when you can enter whatever mix of Quicken's basic asset classes.

Click Done and Quicken will search and not find the security by name; it say Quicken cannot find this security and give you a button to "Use as Symbol". I find this confusing; it means it will use the security name as it's symbol as well. That's fine; you don't actually care what the symbol is.

After the security is created, you can double-click it in the Securities Window at any time, and click on the Price History tab. In this window, you can enter a date and a closing price for the fund on that date. You don't need to fill in any of the other fields (Open, High, Low, Volume); only the Closing Price matters. You can enter this manually as frequently or infrequently as you wish. I'd do it on whatever schedule you get a statement from Prudential, either monthly or quarterly.

Each month or quarter, you can enter the transactions for any share purchases or dividend reinvestments.

With the transactions entered and the price on the non-tracked securities entered, you should compare your Portfolio window — set as filtered by Portfolio Value, grouped by Security — to your Prudential statement, and they should match exactly. (One trick here: for the securities for which you need to enter the latest price, there's a shortcut. You can always go to Window > Securities, double-click on the security, and click on the Price History tab. But if you're on your Portfolio window, click on the security name, and in the pop-up window, click the Edit Security and it takes you right to the security's window, where you can click Price History and enter the date and price.)

@RickO I don't think the Empower purchase of Prudential Retirement has closed yet, so I think it's likely too soon to try connecting via Empower. I don't know how long after the deal closes that account swill actually transition, and how long after that it will be for Quicken to catch up!