Problems with Placeholders in Fidelity Account

System

This discussion was created from comments split from: Fidelity download consistenty overwrites manual transaction with wrong number of shares.

J. Holmes

I too am having issues with Fidelity. I started with a new Quicken File on 12/01/2022 and everything was ok. Over time, I have continued to experience issues with placeholder transactions. Notably, on several occasions, I have taken time to add cost basis info. etc. to the placeholder transactions.

Today, opposed to spending time again adjusting all of the placeholder transactions, I deleted all of them. This action wiped out over 50% of my account balance. I am planning to monitor the account over the next few day in hopes of new placeholder transactions being added back. If not, I suppose my only recourse will be to start all over again.

Quicken Kristina

Hello @J. Holmes,

Thank you for reaching out to the Community and telling us about this issue.  I'm sorry to hear you're running into this problem. Quicken uses placeholder transactions as a way to account for historical data that was not provided by the financial institution. You can review this article for more information. Could you please go into more detail what issues you are running into with the placeholders?

If you have a recent backup from before you deleted those placeholders, restoring that backup may be a less time consuming alternative to starting over.

Thank you.

J. Holmes

@Quicken Kristina - Thanks for the response. On 12/1/2022, I practically started over from scratch with a new Quicken Mac data file. After my Fidelity transactions downloaded, placeholder transactions were created and I spent time updating the placeholder transactions with historical data (e.g., cost basis info.) that I downloaded directly from Fidelity's website.

Each month, I noticed new placeholder transactions were being added. As a result, I spent time each month updating these placeholder transactions so that the cost basis info. was accurate.

For the month of May, opposed to updating the placeholder transactions, I decided to delete the transactions hoping that things would correct themselves and I could avoid spending time updating the historical data. Sadly, deleting the placeholder transactions wiped out over 50% of my account balance.

I attempted to restore Quicken from a back-up, however I suppose I have opened the application more than 5 times today and all of the backup files are dated for today.

I am hopeful that new placeholder transactions will be downloaded tomorrow.

J. Holmes

@Quicken Kristina - FYI, no new placeholder transactions have been downloaded. While the cash balance is accurate, the shares for several securities is inaccurate.

Out of curiosity, does Quicken only create placeholder transactions on set time intervals? Notably, I do download transactions for all my accounts daily.

Jim_Harman

Are you running the Mac or Windows version of Quicken? This discussion is in the Windows section of the forum

J. Holmes

@Jim_Harman - Thanks for pointing this out. I am using Quicken Mac. The moderator split and created this thread for my issue. Hopefully, they can move it to the Mac board.