Downloaded Sold Transactions Are Negative Cash Amount

Brian Coleman

Downloaded investment account Sold transactions import into Quicken as a negative Cash Amount value. To correct this, I have to edit each transaction and then save it which changes the negative cash to positive. Is there an automatic or multiple transaction fix?

Tom Young

Financial Institution sending this download? Downloading method?

Any chance you could post a screen shot of a transaction that shows this.?

When you edit the transaction, what are you changing that makes it work?

Brian Coleman

I'm downloading from Epic (https://www.go-retire.com/). They export a .OFX data file that imports into my investment account register. To get it to change from a negative amount to a positive amount, I don't have to change anything. I double-click the transaction to open the Edit window and then click Enter/Done, and it changes to a positive amount. I have to do this with each Sold transaction which takes about 10 seconds each. My normal import with Sold transactions each month has around 30-50 transactions, so it's very time consuming.

See the attached screenshots:
1.png - how the transaction imports
2.png - the Edit screen where I immediately click Enter/Done

Tom Young

Boy, that's very, very odd. The transaction looks correct as downloaded and the Edit screen certainly looks correct. Is this "new behavior" or has this always been the case with this Quicken Account?

If it is new behavior and you can associate it with a Quicken update, then going back to the upgrade immediately before it might be worth a try. Or, sometimes you'll get odd behavior in a Quicken Investment Account because of one "damaged" entry that affects subsequent entries. In that case deleting transactions before the problem began and entering the transactions again manually will clear things up.

I assume (having never actually downloaded a .OFX file,) that you can look at that file in Notepad. If that's the case then the first thing I might try is to look at the information being sent about one of these transactions to see if anything in the sequence of entries surrounding that sale looks at all odd. If this if fairly recent new behavior you could also compare that to a "known good" sale to see if anything stands out as being different. This seems like a long shot as the transaction as downloaded looks fine and simply clicking "Edit" and then "Done" really shouldn't do a thing.

After that I guess I'd try the Copy > Validate process described here Advanced Data File Troubleshooting to Correct Problems With Quicken for Windows (Third item)

and assume all that doesn't work then a complete removal of the Quicken program and a reinstall would seem to be the last thing to try.

There's certainly no setting or preference that you can jiggle to make this work properly. You might want to give a call to Official Quicken Support here to see if they have some suggestions.

Brian Coleman

Thanks, Tom, for your timely and thorough response.