Understanding how to handle offline investment accounts
I started using Quicken last week, one of the brokerages I use doesn't support any of the online connection methods and I can't seem to figure out how I should categorize the transactions on the online side and offline side to make everything resolve properly.
Issue # 1:
Monthly investment from checking → investment account. The checking account is online and pulls transactions. I tried marking it as a Transfer→Investment account. This ends up showing up as a Payment/Deposit transaction in the investment account and adds to the cash holding in the investment account (even though in reality it goes straight to shares). So I go in to manually enter a Buy transaction in the investment account to move the funds from cash to the security. If I put in the total, but leave the #shares blank, expecting it to auto-calculate based on the daily price (mutual fund), it leaves it as 0 shares. If I look up the full transaction details I can make it reconcile, but its feeling like I'm making extra work for myself, but this might be the correct workflow.
Issue #2:
When I setup the offline brokerage account, its listed as a live opening balance that should auto-correct for pre-dated transactions, but since they are also transfers(Payment/Deposit), the predated transactions just blows up the cash balance and messes up the actual opening balance.
Thanks in advance for any tips y'all have.
Answers
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Howdy, Eric N:
Handling an investment account offline isn't a big deal, but it just requires a little more work.
Issue 1:
It sounds like you are doing things correctly regarding the transfer & Buy up until the point of entering the price: Even if you have already set up the Security and downloaded price histories, that field won’t be populated with that cost data. Anything you enter in the Buy transaction (either it be the Share amount, or Price/Share) will determine the other field. (And if the cost is different than what was downloaded, your transaction entry takes precedence and )
I suggest you find out the # of shares purchased and cost, and let Quicken calculate the cost. (What you pay for a security can be different than actual closing price.)
Issue 2:
You can manually retype a similar transaction for the opening Balance, and it won’t have that “Magic” auto update status. Then delete the original account creation one. You can also use the Account: Adjust Balance to do similar and choose the option where it isn’t “Live”.
I hope this helps!
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Thank you John_in_NC, I'll give all your tips a try tonight.
RickO, its Victory Captial, which from a search on here suggests its a known issue that they seem to have no timeline to fix. There also was an Alert from Quicken side that there was an issue, that they claim is resolved as of yesterday, but I still get the error when I try to connect. From my understanding of the issues, VCM only setup download/connection of regular banking data (which they don't do) and not investment data.
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I'm still having some confusion over Issue 2.
It seems if I use either a "live" opening balance of a single fixed transaction, all the pre-dated transactions from the online account just cause problems. Do I need to find older statements/point-in-time values for the offline account to start its history before the furthest in the past online transaction?
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@Eric N That would be one way to fix that problem.
Another way would be to have the same start date for both accounts and delete any transactions in the online account that are older than that. Just because the online account downloaded transactions from the last several months doesn't mean you have to keep them.
Yet another way would be to change the pre-dated transfers from the online account so they don't actually transfer into your offline account. Change them from Transfer:[Offline Account] to Transfer. That way there are no transactions in your offline account prior to the opening balance transaction.
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