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How to add an Opening Balance to a Brokerage Account

Shannon M M

In my never ending struggle to get my Vanguard Cash Plus account in order, I managed to lose the opening balance entry. Now there's a negative number for the cash balance in the first entry that appears to have appeared out of nowhere.

I know I can create an adjustment. But for the sake of accuracy I'd like to insert a $0 "Opneing Balance" as is used and easy to do in the bank accounts. Yet I haven't found a way to do this in a brokerage account.

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Shannon M M

P.S. I've temporarily added an adjustment on the day of account opening which brings the "Cash Balance" in the lower right in line with reality ($). But the running cash balance in the column goes off again right away in the next row by the same amount that was off before.

Is there something hidden that I need to make appear and delete?

Tom Young

That Opening Balance entry can be edited, just like any other transaction. So fix that by deleting the negative number and entering a $0 figure. Having Opening Balance numbers change is not entirely uncommon, unfortunately, a is somehow associated with downloads. It's not something that happens all the time but from time to time you'll see a rash of "Quicken changed my Opening Balance" posts, so it does happen. One way to safeguard yourself is to put the correct Opening Balance figure in the Memo field of that opening balance transaction.

Your second problem sounds like it could be a Placeholder issue. Under Edit > Preferences… > Investments make sure "Show hidden transactions" is checked.

Shannon M M

Perhaps I didn’t explain this well enough.

However, I was able to replicate the Opening Balance entry from a different account as follows:

Actions>Enter Transactions

Enter transaction: Deposit, Payee: Opening Balance, Amount: $0. But note that you must use Actions>Enter Transactions and not the next available line where you will not be allowed to save a transaction with a $0 entry.

This did not solve the ultimate problem that there is a negative amount showing in the Cash Balance column next to an Opening Balance entry of $0. There are no previous entries, so where that negative amount is coming from is a mystery and I look forward to hearing ideas.

(I’ve removed the adjustment that I created so that I’m not adding more “noise” to a situation I want to correct.)

Chris_QPW

"Opening Balance" is basically a "Balance Adjustment", and Quicken uses the syntax of filling in the category with [Account], where "Account" is the name of the account you are in. This syntax tells Quicken to adjust the balance as if the amount came from/went to outside of Quicken.

Let's say that I want to start an investment account on January 1st, 2023, with a balance of $5,000 in an account call "Joint XX1559".

This would do that:

Now on January 1, 2023 the balance will be $5,000. Of course, you need to ensure that the date you use makes sure that this is the first transaction in the register.

Shannon M M

You've just restated what I said I did.

The first entry in the account is an Opening Balance of $0.

The corresponding Cash Balance is -$2,104.52.

The following day there is a deposit of $25,000. The corresponding Cash Balance is $22,895.48.

There are no previous entries to account for that -$2,104.52 amount. There are no previous entries, period.

Chris_QPW

OK, got it. Then that sound like some kind of corruption in the account register.

I would try:

File → Validate and Repair File… → Validate file → OK

If that doesn't fix it try holding down Ctrl and Shift while selecting the same as above and that will get you Super Validate.

Shannon M M

Thanks Chris.

This exposed other issues that may or may not be related. And if it’s the latter, I hate to go down that rabbit hole. But in the interest of complete information, I’ll integrate it here. These logs are severely lacking in useful information. But I’ve tried to track down what is not explicitly stated.

Here are the steps I took starting with the first basic Validate & Repair resulting in:

QDF:

Validating your data.

Quicken repaired damaged transaction index. No action required.

Summary:

Quicken repaired 1 accounts. No action required.

QEL:

No read errors.

QEL:

All internal consistency checks passed.

[Thu Aug 24 11:52:05 2023]

Corrected 4 transactions with missing attachments.

Maximum security reference: 53, number of securities: 53.

Invalid category type corrected

No out-of-range security references found.

Validation has completed.

… and then the opening cash balance changed to -$4,312.08.

First, I found the entry causing the difference from the previous erroneous amount. It was a "Cash Transferred Out" entry that was appearing as a positive number in the register! It was correctly entered as a positive number in the “Amount to Transfer” field in the “Cash Transferred out of Account” window. And there were other entries with this issue.

Hoping Quicken would catch the error on round two, I changed the date of the transactions by one day and ran Validate & Repair again:

[Thu Aug 24 11:57:46 2023]

QDF:

Validating your data.

Quicken repaired ACCT_412 account. No action required.

QEL:

No read errors.

QEL:

All internal consistency checks passed.

[Thu Aug 24 11:58:24 2023]

Maximum security reference: 53, number of securities: 53.

Invalid category type corrected

No out-of-range security references found.

Validation has completed.

The entries remained as positive amounts. And now there’s a weird “ACCT_412” account that appeared out of nowhere.

So, I delinked the entries from the problem account by changing the category in the originating accounts to Credit Card Payment (not associated to another account). Then I ran Validate & Repair again:

QDF:

Validating your data.

Repaired your data file by removing a damaged category. Please check your category list for missing categories by going to Tools>Category List.

QEL:

No read errors.

QEL:

All internal consistency checks passed.

[Thu Aug 24 12:13:46 2023]

Maximum security reference: 53, number of securities: 53.

No out-of-range security references found.

Validation has completed.

I found “ACCT_412” in Categories. I then did an All Accounts search for the term and found one entry: Another “Cash Transferred out of Account” entry linked from a credit card payment and being expressed as a positive amount. There was no visible “ACCT_412” in the original or the linked entry. However, I de-linked it as I did with the previous entries, but it still showed up in the search for “ACCT_412” within the originating account. I deleted it from the originating account along with the other problematic entries in their originating accounts. (These are all from different credit card accounts and I will enter them manually after this issue is solved.) I then ran a search for ACCT_412 again on All Transactions and an entirely new one came up! Again, with no visible entry of “ACCT_412”. I deleted it, too, from the originating account, then did another search and when that came up empty, I deleted the Category. (The warning window did confirm that it was unused.) I closed Quicken and reopened it for good measure and re-ran Validate & Repair:

[Thu Aug 24 13:13:50 2023]

QDF:

Validating your data.

No errors.

QEL:

No read errors.

QEL:

All internal consistency checks passed.

[Thu Aug 24 13:14:46 2023]

1 scheduled transactions corrected

Maximum security reference: 53, number of securities: 53.

No out-of-range security references found.

Validation has completed.

So back to square one. The Cash Balance in the Opening Balance entry of the problem account is now $1,520.97. So, I proceeded with a Super Validate.

[Thu Aug 24 14:30:26 2023]

QDF:

Validating your data.

No errors.

QEL:

No read errors.

QEL:

All internal consistency checks passed.

[Thu Aug 24 14:31:08 2023]

1 scheduled transactions corrected

Maximum security reference: 53, number of securities: 53.

No out-of-range security references found.

Super validation has completed.

But still the unaccounted-for negative balance of -$1,520.97 is there on the first Opening Balance line of the account.

Plus the new question- If you think it is unrelated, no need to read on. Please ignore it for now. But if you do think that it may be related:

I have no “scheduled transactions”. So, what was “corrected” (but not really corrected because it keeps showing up in the logs)? Back in April, I had unsuccessfully tried to rid myself of this problem but was stymied when I tried to deactivate and reactivate the online services for the account (a separate brokerage account) by a message saying that Quicken could not edit the account because “there are downloaded transactions that must first be accepted into the account register”. There are no Downloaded Transactions to accept.

This time I successfully disconnected, reconnected and ”linked to existing” account. I ran Super Validate again, and again got:

[Thu Aug 24 14:59:33 2023]

QDF:

Validating your data.

No errors.

QEL:

No read errors.

QEL:

All internal consistency checks passed.

[Thu Aug 24 15:00:19 2023]

1 scheduled transactions corrected

Maximum security reference: 53, number of securities: 53.

No out-of-range security references found.

Super validation has completed.

I then went through each account again and verified that there are NO “scheduled transactions”. Again, please ignore the “scheduled transaction” error if you don’t feel it’s relevant to the cash balance issue.

I’m also concerned about what was done to “correct” the 4 transactions with missing attachments? Attachments aren’t required, so how can they be “missing”? But that may also be for another day. I just hope it didn’t mess up something important.

Chris_QPW

As you said nothing it reported seems to directly related to your original problem. As for the "missing attachments" I suspect what it is saying is there is normal a "link" pointing what file is storing an attachment, and that link isn't valid, so it removed it.

Here is another thing to try:

File → Validate and Repair File… → select Rebuild investing lots → OK

If that still doesn't clear the problem the last thing I can think of is moving all the transactions to another account. Create a new account and select the gear icon in the problem account and then Move Transactions.

Select all the transactions and the account to move them to and then Move.

Shannon M M

(Removed accidental double post.)

Shannon M M

(Removed accidental double post.)

Shannon M M

(Removed accidental double post.)

Shannon M M

Thank you for your help. I'll noodle it over. I've had to rebuild everything three times before because of file corruptions that happened when I restored from backups and I really don't want to do it again. So maybe patch-up with adjustments rout is the way to go this time.

Chris_QPW

Sometimes "punting" is the best option. 😉