How best to re-sync/restore a messed-up investment account

ajkessel

My synced Fidelity investment accounts in Quicken Classic for Windows have never been correct. I'm not sure it's worth the work to manually adjust everything, but I'm wondering if there is some way to automatically do it. If I delete the accounts, all of the transfers into and out of my regular bank accounts will also be lost or unmatched. So I'm thinking the best thing might be to disconnect all of the accounts from online, create new fresh accounts synced to Fidelity, and then have a transfer from the old broken accounts to the new fresh accounts to establish the starting balance. Is there a more elegant solution to this situation?

Tom Young

If you plan to transfer broken information into new Account, then really, what's the point in going through the "transfer" process in the first place? Adding "good" transactions to broken information still results in broken information, you might as well stick with the current Accounts. And you know what? Those "good" transactions might very well (probably will) might just add their own errors into the mix.

The hard truth is that you simply cannot rely entirely on "downloads" ("sync") to get everything correct in Investment Accounts, particularly in the the case of so-called "corporate actions" like splits, mergers, spin-offs, acquisitions, etc.

Quicken "helps you do you're accounting", it can't really "do your accounting for you", particularly with Investment Accounts that often involve complex transactions, complexity that the downloads frequently don't handle properly.

If I was in your shoes and didn't want to do the difficult - and maybe impossible - work of fixing every single "wrong" transaction from the time the Account was established up to "today" , I might:

1. Make adjustments to security holdings to at least get the number of shares of each security properly stated. If the broker has a solid "cost" number for a particular security I'd adjust that too. Adds/Removes and "Update share balances" (from the gear-wheel menu) would be the tools for that.
2. TURN OFF "Automatic entry" of downloads into the Account(s)
3. LOOK AT and understand each downloaded transaction to determine if the transaction can be accepted into the Transaction List "as is" or if you need to not accept the transaction(s) and make your own, correct entries. (The vast, vast majority of transactions downloaded into an Investment Account involve routine things like dividends, buys and sells that you simply accept because those downloads ARE typically correct. It's the "corporate actions" that frequently need your help.)

That sequence should, at least, get your securities properly stated as to number of shares and maybe "overall" cost basis too, even at the "lot level" for all transactions from "today."