Incorrect "Balancing Cash Adjustment" Place holder

NJTeddy

I have an investment account where any remaining cash balance is transfer to a Sweep Account. I had a month were that Type of transfer was made twice to absorb stock dividends. The sweep transactions match the available cash balance exactly. Every time I try to enter a purchase Quicken creates a "Balancing Cash Adjustment" to the account rather than remove the cash balance already there. I read other posts and tried opening and closing Quicken. That allowed one of the purchases to enter correctly, but the second purchase still creates a "Balancing Cash Adjustment" rather than use the available cash. Cant delete the BC adjustment because it also removes the purchase entry. Tied validating the data file and no issues were found. I have no idea how to correct this. Ultimately I would really like to turn off quicken's ability to create these entries and never have to deal with this nuisance. **The purchases were made the same day as the dividend posted. I also tried having the sales post 1 day prior to the purchases and still a BC adjustment entry was created.

Tom Young

There is simply no way to have Quicken "do your accounting for you", PARTICULARLY when it comes to Investment Accounts. Go to Edit > Preferences > Downloaded transactions and make sure that "Automatically add to investment transaction list" is not selected. That will allow you to tell the Placeholder suggestion to go away.

As a general statement, if you want accuracy in your Account, you should never accept a placeholder. Frequently Quicken is simply wrong here, and if it's not then you have a problem in your Investment Account that you need to solve.

Jim_Harman

The automatically generated Balancing Cash Adjustment generally means that there are one or more Placeholders for the affected security at a later date than the transaction you are trying to enter.

You must delete the Placeholder(s) before Quicken will let you successfully enter any transaction for the problem security that affects the cash balance. Once you have deleted the Placeholder(s), you can delete the cash adjustments.

NJTeddy

Thank you both, learned a lot. In past I had entered everything from my statements so never ran into place holders before. I was unable to work on my accounts for a bit so I downloaded the info, there was quite a bit so I accepted all and have been in the process of reconciling month by month to get things back on track. That is probably where I ran into the placeholders. Removing the place holders fixed things and I did change preferences so as not to run into this again...........Again Thank you!

ellgee533

I have two accounts where the totals in Quicken do not match the totals in my financial institutions. The cash value in both accounts match to the penny. Is there a way to place an entry in Quicken to make the value of the portfolios agree without affecting my net worth. I have spent hours looking for any errors, but alas, I can't find any. The quantities of each of the stocks are equal in both Quicken and my bank. Frustrated!!

Tom Young

Are you speaking to variances in the cost basis, or market values? You say you want to make an adjustment without affecting net worth, so I have to assume it's a cost basis difference, right? Are your cost basis values higher or lower than that shown by the financial institutions, or maybe both?