How to track down invisible transactions?

Eric N

I just started using Quicken yesterday. Got most of my accounts set up to pull data automatically. Two weren't supported and I have to handle those manually (will have more questions on those later). Everything was looking reasonable yesterday. Today I was prompted to update to the new April version, with the net worrh card, and that's making something look very odd. There must be some hidden transactions about 15 months ago, and another about 7 months ago that adds and remove millions of dollars. It doesn't show up in the All Transaction lists. It doesn't show up as a line item in the calender view, but does show up as a changing total in the calendar view. It seems to be some artifact — I've never made a pair of transactions like that. And it doesn't really matter, but it does make the net worth chart look really odd. As it predates the date on any of the account I had to enter manually, I don't think its related to those.

And it makes me wonder what else I did wrong when getting set up that will surprise me later.

jacobs

Do you have investment account(s)? If so, I;'m guessing there might be a wrong price for a security on one day which is causing the spike and then the return to normal. To try to hunt this down and fix it…

Try clicking on one investment account, then click on Portfolio tab. Set the graph to 1 year ot 3 years, as necessary, so you can see if there's a big spike. If you can identify the date of the spike, set the "Data as of" date to that date, and set the filter to show "Portfolio Value" and "By Security". One of the secutities will have the mnassive valuation. Click on the security, click Edit Security, click Price history, and scroll to the date in question, where you'll find a price that's way out of line. You can delete the price for this day, or look it up on some website end enter the correct price. And that should remove the odd jump in value in the calendar and the net worth graph. Repeat on other dates, or for other accounts, if there is another blip on a different date.

jacobs

Do you have investment account(s)? If so, I;'m guessing there might be a wrong price for a security on one day which is causing the spike and then the return to normal. To try to hunt this down and fix it…

Try clicking on one investment account, then click on Portfolio tab. Set the graph to 1 year ot 3 years, as necessary, so you can see if there's a big spike. If you can identify the date of the spike, set the "Data as of" date to that date, and set the filter to show "Portfolio Value" and "By Security". One of the secutities will have the mnassive valuation. Click on the security, click Edit Security, click Price history, and scroll to the date in question, where you'll find a price that's way out of line. You can delete the price for this day, or look it up on some website end enter the correct price. And that should remove the odd jump in value in the calendar and the net worth graph. Repeat on other dates, or for other accounts, if there is another blip on a different date.

Eric N

Thank you.Found the security, looks like the problem was related to a stock split that happened.

All the stock prices in the price history were correct, but looks like it used post-split prices when setting up the initial position on the account, even though it was pre-split (ie looks like it took the value of the holding at beginning of imported history / price in today's stock to calculate the number of shares to initialize) but then instantly inflated it by x20. Once it caught up with the actual time when the split occured, everything fixed itself.

My solution, delete all the pre-split price history. There's probably a better way, but all the graphs look ok now.

Jon

The online sources of stock info that I've looked at always adjust their historical prices after a stock split so the price history looks consistent; Quicken's source for prices must be doing the same thing. If you happen to have them available you could try entering the unadjusted prices by hand, maybe once a month or so just to get a rough history.