Why is the Cash Amt column for an investment transaction N/A for a sale transaction?

stustra

I am entering a sale transaction (e.g., selling 100 shares of a ML Bank Deposit Program account) which results in N/A in the Cash Amt column. This is not a "BoughtX" or "placeholder" transaction. So why won't Quicken correctly calculate the Cash Amt (i.e., increase my cash balance)? Thanks for your help.

Jim_Harman

The N/A appears when there is a Placeholder for the problem security with a later date than the transaction you are trying to enter.

To make Placeholders visible, go to Edit > Preferences > Investing and make sure the Show hidden transactions box is checked. 

Placeholders will have a gray background in the account’s transaction list (register) even if they are not selected, and will have “Entry” in the Action column.

Placeholders compensate for missing or incorrect investing transactions by forcing Quicken’s share balance for a security to match a specified value on the date of the Paceholder. This is usually the share count downloaded from your financial institution (FI).

Because transactions are missing or incorrect, Quicken will not be able to compute the cost basis or performance for the affected securities. You will see asterisks in the Portfolio views for this data.

Placeholders also prevent new transactions like Div, Bought and Sold prior to the security’s Placeholder date from affecting the account’s cash balance. It does this by creating a linked Cash Balance Adjustment just before the affected transaction. Deleting one of these will delete them both. This shows up as N/A in the Cash Amt column of the transaction list. To allow the cash balance to change when entering missing transactions that affect the cash balance, you must first delete all the Placeholders for this security that have later dates than the transaction you are entering.

  

Always back up your data file before changing historical transactions.

For information on resolving placeholders, please see this FAQ:

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7267839/quicken-faq-managing-placeholder-entries-in-quicken-for-windows