Placeholders, and mutual fund balances and cash -oh my. - iMac

Airboss

I've worked on this problem for what seems like hours trying to get the number of shares to match correctly on a mutual fund. I don't have to endure anywhere near this level of difficulty on my PC, not sure why the Mac and PC versions are so different. I have actually several mutual funds in my Quicken file with similar and/or different degrees of difficulty. The share numbers don't match what my broker shown online, so I've been trying to get them correct by few different methods, adding shares, edit, re-edit, download, wash rinse repeat etc.---- 1. There's a 'placeholder' that you simply cannot get rid of which would make things simple. Can't get rid of the placeholder and you can't edit it successfully 2. The list has the mutual fund symbol in some entries, (under the column labelled Security/payee) and has the full name of the fund itself, and you cannot edit the name at all. Why can't you edit this- a totally insane feature. 3. Some of the funds on my list also have a cash balance, yet there does not seem to be a way to change this without the numbers going bonkers. 4. When you try to do 1,2, or 3, the numbers get stupid, like all of a sudden you are running a six figure balance sometimes red, sometimes black. 5. Is there an instruction video of some sort on YouTube or another venue that isn't either a blatant sales promotion or so elementary that it's patronizing and insulting to one's intelligence? Thanks.

Jon

Quicken will put in a placeholder transaction if necessary to make the current account balance match what your brokerage is reporting. This can happen if you're setting things up for the first time and you don't get a complete history of all your transactions in the account (which can easily happen if the account is more than a year or two old - downloads usually don't go back farther than that.

There's a couple ways around that. One is to manually enter the entire history of your account all the way back to when it was first opened. This should be doable if you kept account statements but could be rather time consuming if the account is old.

The other way is to just pick some point in time in the past to be your "starting point" and use Add Shares and/or Deposit transaction to set the account holdings & cash balance as of that date. Then enter all the transactions from that point forward to the present day.

Using a mix of those two methods I've never had an issue with getting account balances & holdings to be current without any placeholder transactions.

I don't know what to tell you about uneditable security names, I've never run into that.