How best to “catch up” on investment transaction downloads from past 20 years?

Question

I started using Quicken ~1985 before I got married and had enough time to download all my monthly investment transactions (Vanguard & Schwab).  After marriage and kids, I maintained the monthly saving and checking downloads, but didn’t have time for the increasingly complex investment transactions (e.g., IRA, 403(b), 529, etc.).  Now that I’m an empty nester with more time, is there a way to “catch up” on investment transaction downloads from past 20 years? I did transfer all my Schwab holdings to Vanguard ~15 years ago.

Jim_Harman · Accepted Answer

If you just want to track your accounts going forward and don't care about your cost basis or past investment performance, you could simply connect your current accounts to Vanguard.

That will download quite a lot but certainly not all of your past transactions and generate Placeholders to make your current holdings correct.

Be sure to back up your data before trying this, in case you do not like the result.

Frankx · Accepted Answer

Hi @rtc1135,

For your Vanguard accounts, you actually should be able to download historical transactions for the past 18 months. This will result in having a more complete history in Quicken, but will, of course, require more work on your part.  If you decide to go this route - make sure you make a good backup of your datafile first.

If that's what you want to do you need to login to your accounts at the Vanguard website, using your User Name and Password.  For each account at Vanguard, take the following steps:

1) Click on "My Accounts" > in the drop-down menu, go to the "Transactions" column and click on "Transaction history";
2) In the Download account information" window > for Step 1 - select "Quicken : All funds to a single account";
3) For Step 2 - "Select date range" > you'll want to select "18 months";
4) For Step 3 - you will see your accounts listed.  I would suggest that you download one account at a time, rather than checking all boxes. Then hit the "Download" button at the bottom of the screen. 
5) After you complete the above steps for each of your Vanguard accounts, you'll have a one "*.qfx" file for each account. Then just double click on each downloaded file and the transactions will be added to your Q datafile.

Let me know if you have any followups.

Frankx

Jim_Harman · Accepted Answer

If you have accepted Placeholders to compensate for the missing transactions and want to enter them manually, please post back for further instructions.

This is known as "resolving" the placeholders.

Frankx · Accepted Answer

Hi again @rtc1135,

Assuming that you did a broker to broker transfer, Vanguard has your correct cost basis for those holdings on its website (and in its files), and that data would have to include cost data that Vanguard received from Schwab when you did the transfer.  So, I expect that if you've been reinvesting dividends over the years, you will have some gaps in specific transactions, but the cost basis should be solid.

Frankx