Transition from manual to automatic downloads - Vanguard multiple accts to single acct

DLR1951

For many years I did my Quicken entirely manually. In particular, I did this with several different mutual funds in an IRA held by Vanguard, with each mutual fund listed as an individual account. Recently I have updated Quicken and am trying to update my holdings by downloading transactions, rather than manually. But when I do this with my Vanguard IRA, Quicken considers this a single account, although it does list the separate transactions to the individual mutual funds. Is it possible to link up these transactions to my old set of individual mutual fund accounts?

Jim_Harman

Have you already set up the online Vanguard account and downloaded and accepted the historical transactions?

If so, you now have some transactions that are duplicated between the new combined account and your old accounts. The combined account will also have a Placeholder for each fund that sets the share balance to match the current balance.

To straighten this out, you should back up your data in case something goes wrong. Then
-- Note the oldest transaction for each security in the new account.
-- Click on the gear in each old account and pick Move Transactions.
-- Carefully select the transactions prior to the oldest one in the new account and move them to the new account.
-- If everything worked correctly, the Placeholder for that security should show 0 shares and you can delete it and also delete the remaining transactions in the old account. These are the ones that were already downloaded into the new account.
-- Back up again and repeat for the other old accounts.

An easier way to handle this would be to use the Shares Transferred between account action to move the holdings prior to the oldest download date from each old account to the new one. This will remove the selected shares from the old accounts and add each tax lot to the new one. This will look messy, with potentially dozens of Added transactions in the new account, especially if you have years of reinvested dividends.

In this case the old transactions will remain in the old accounts, so if you want to see performance over a period that includes the transition, you should include both the old and new accounts in the analysis.

q_lurker

Is it possible to link up these transactions to my old set of individual mutual fund accounts?

Is this Vanguard IRA account a Vanguard Brokerage Account or a set of Vanguard Mutual Fund accounts?  Likely a brokerage account cannot be set up as and linked to multiple Quicken accounts, so in that case, No.

If the IRA is a set of individual mutual fund accounts, then Vanguard MIGHT be willing to restructure the account numbers to be unique to each fund.  They used to be amenable to either way, but as they have moved more toward the brokerage account structure, I am not sure how accommodating they might be. 

As a broader consideration, I'd urge you to move away from the one-fund = one account structure.  I find that system far less flexible as you restructure investments over time and change holdings.  The single Vanguard IRA account that they have established should work better in the long run (in my opinion), once you get the transition from multiple accounts to one account reconciled.