I have an investment account that is not deducting the purchase amount from cash

uknowdakine

I have a Raymond James investment account and if I manually enter transactions or fix Placeholder Entries using "Buy - Shares Bought", Quicken does not deduct the cost from cash. The box "Use cash for this transaction" appears only when manually entering a transaction but when I enter the Security name, it disappears. When I fix a Placeholder, that box never appears. The register shows N/A for Cash Amount and the Action show Bought not BouhgtX. All the downloaded transactions are fine, they deduct from cash. I am using Quicken version R42.19 build 27.1.42.19. What am I doing wrong?

Jim_Harman

You are not doing anything wrong; you have encountered a "feature" of Placeholders. Placeholders prevent new transactions like Bought and Sold prior to the security's Placeholder date from affecting the account’s cash balance. This shows up as N/A in the Cash Amt column of the transaction list. 

To allow the cash balance to change when entering missing Bought and Sold transactions, you must first delete the Placeholder.

Always back up your data file before changing historical transactions.

uknowdakine

Thanks Jim, got to love undocumented features. So I deleted all the placeholders and most of the securities fixed themselves and there are values in the Cash Amt column, a few did not. I deleted the securities that still had N/A in the Cash Amt column and created new transactions. As soon as I entered the security name, the "Use cash for the transaction" box disappears and the resulting transaction has an N/A in the Cash Amt column. Could this be due to the same security having transactions in later dates?

Jim_Harman

Deleted the securities? It should not let you delete securities that have any transactions. Do you mean you deleted the transactions that have N/A?

If you re still getting N/As it sounds like you have not deleted all the Placeholders. To the right of "Downloaded Transactions" at the bottom of the transaction list, it should say Placeholders with a number next to it. If that number is not 0, you still have placeholders. Click on the word Placeholders. Are any shown?

uknowdakine

Sorry for my wording. You are correct, I deleted the transactions with N/A in the Cash Amt column. All of the placeholders were deleted using the delete all button. A work around I found was to add the transaction with today's date and then go back and edit the transaction to reflect the correct date, The security itself has transactions that are newer than the one I am adding, was not sure if this has any bearing on adding a transaction with an earlier date?