Using historical prices in transactions

hurwi

I have an account with stock transactions leading back to the early 2000's, but somehow the price per share is incorrect for many transactions (leading to an inaccurate Cost Basis). I'd like to redo the transactions with accurate price per share.

I've been able to download the accurate price per share into Quicken from a CSV from Yahoo! Finance, however, this does not update the transactions with the accurate price per share.

Is there any way to have Quicken automatically use the price per share from the historical stock data loaded into Quicken instead of using the price per share as entered in the transaction? Or at least an easy way to change the price per share for each transaction to pull from the historical data?

jacobs

I can't think of any way you could do this automatically. You wouldn't want Quicken pulling transaction prices from its price history, since the end-of-day price in its price table may not be the actual purchase price you paid. 

In Quicken Mac, for a security purchase transaction, if you enter a total cost and a number of shares, it will calculate the price per share. Assuming your cost is correct and your shares are correct, is it showing a wrong price per share? Can you capture a screen shot of such a transaction.

hurwi

@jacobs the total cost is incorrect, only number of shares are correct. I want to use the price per share to correct the total cost.

jacobs

So if you change the transaction cost, then your cash balance in the account will change, and you'll also have to edit or add the transactions which added cash to the account. You're saying your cost basis is off, but if you transaction costs are wrong, then your cash balance is off as well. Unless you entered adjustments for cash along the way? 

In the latest Quicken Mac, you can edit a transaction and switch it to calculate the total cost by multiplying the shares by the price. But you'd have to enter the correct price of the transaction (which, as I noted, is likely slightly different than the closing price on that date). And I think you'd have to do this one transaction at a time. 

Ballpark, how many transactions are you talking about? A few dozen? Hundreds? More? Do you have the actual transaction records, either in paper statements or that you can view on your brokerage's site? 

hurwi

These are reinvest dividend transactions and so do not affect my cash balance. There are hundreds of transactions. They were downloaded from Schwabs site in a CSV and somehow Schwab has the cost per share wrong.

jacobs

Ah, okay, now I think I understand fully. Unfortunately, that doesn't change the fact that you'll need to edit the transactions individually if you want to fix your cost basis.

Or, if you can easily see your cost basis/unrealized gain on the Schwab web site, you might decide to leave your Quicken costs basis the way it is, and just rely on the info from Schwab for this account.