Investing accounts not reconiling

bob@9

I was updatingmy prudential 401k account which never worked with the automated download so all transactions over many years were manually entered. I have 3 problems and have run multiple file validations prior to reporting these issues.
1. when entering buy transactions randomly the system will not deduct from the accounts cash balance. I've confirmed it is a bought transaction and not a boughtx transaction. some for the same security work just fine others do not.
2. After fighting the problem above for quite a while, I just tried to do a holdings reconsilation and entered the number of shares and value for each security. that resulted in a cash blance adjustent and doubling the value of the securities without showing any transactions other than the cash balanced adjustment in the ledger.
3. i noticed that the action type dropdown list for this account differs when entering directly in the ledger then if I right click and edit a transaction. for instance when entering the traction in the ledger directly there is a "bought" and "boughtx" action type. When editing the transaction these types don't exist and its replaced with "buy - shared bought"

any help is greatly appreciated.

Jim_Harman

1. A Buy that does not affect the cash balance usually indicates that there is a Placeholder for that security at a later date. Sometimes the Placeholders are hidden in your Transaction List (Register). To make Placeholders visible, go to Edit > Preferences > Investment Transactions and make sure the Show hidden transactions box is checked. 

Placeholders will have a gray background in the account’s transaction list (register) even if they are not selected, and will have “Entry” in the Action column.

Placeholders compensate for missing or incorrect investing transactions by forcing Quicken’s share balance for a security to match a specified value. This is usually the share count downloaded from your financial institution (FI).

Because transactions are missing or incorrect, Quicken will not be able to compute the cost basis or performance for the affected securities. You will see asterisks in the Portfolio views for this data.

Placeholders also prevent new transactions like Div, 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 transactions that affect the cash balance, you must first delete the Placeholder.

For information on resolving placeholders, please see this FAQ:

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7267839/quicken-faq-managing-placeholder-entries-in-quicken-for-windows

Always back up your data file before changing historical transactions.