Change Total Value of an Offline investment account without individual securities

pitosalas

I am on Mac, running the latest Quicken. I have one investment account which does not have online access. I receive a paper statement each month. I would like to update the total value of the account each month. I could add a fake security with a $1 value and update the number of that security but there probably is a cleaner way to do it. How?

RickO

Depends on what you want to track. If all you want is the total value of the account to appear in the sidebar/net worth, then I'd do just what you mention. Alternatively, you could just put cash in the account and change that initial single cash transaction monthly. Or you could enter new plus/minus cash transactions each month that represent the change in value. The advantage of either $1 security method or the monthly cash plus/minus entry method is that you will have a history of the change in value over time.

You don't mention what or how many assets are in this account. If the account holds several securities and you want to maintain a complete history in quicken, then you should probably manually enter all the transaction info from each monthly statement, including latest securities prices, in the transaction register for the manual account.

Jon

That's basically what I did with my 401K, although I tracked each fund inside the 401K for asset allocation purposes. I created several fake securities, each with a $1 value, and adjusted the number of shares of each every time I received a statement.

RickO

Depends on what you want to track. If all you want is the total value of the account to appear in the sidebar/net worth, then I'd do just what you mention. Alternatively, you could just put cash in the account and change that initial single cash transaction monthly. Or you could enter new plus/minus cash transactions each month that represent the change in value. The advantage of either $1 security method or the monthly cash plus/minus entry method is that you will have a history of the change in value over time.

You don't mention what or how many assets are in this account. If the account holds several securities and you want to maintain a complete history in quicken, then you should probably manually enter all the transaction info from each monthly statement, including latest securities prices, in the transaction register for the manual account.

Jon

That's basically what I did with my 401K, although I tracked each fund inside the 401K for asset allocation purposes. I created several fake securities, each with a $1 value, and adjusted the number of shares of each every time I received a statement.

RickO

Actually, I misread your method the first time. Another option would be to create a security with a share price equal to the total value and keep one share of that security in the account. Same result. I think the maintenance might be a little easier this way perhaps. With your method, you could either (1) change the date/share number on a single transaction maintained in the account (but you'd have no history), or calculate the difference and add an add/remove shares transaction (which would maintain history). But adding a new share price in the 1-share security's edit pane might be easier and still maintain history. Not sure if there are any other pros or cons to these two alternatives.