Journal Entry Actions

Question

My father passed away at the end of Nov 2023. He used Quicken to keep track of his entire investment portfolio.

Since his passing, I have worked with all the investment firms he used in getting his accounts transferred to his beneficiary, taking RMD's and other housecleaning activities.

Now it's time to clean up Quicken as his old accounts are closed, new accounts have been created and a lot of transactions have occurred. The problem is that I have never used Quicken and am having difficulty entering transactions with the list of Actions I have to choose from.

My question is, what is the best and fastest way for me to understand and work with the Journal Actions? For example, I want to show that a transfer was made into an account but the best Action I have for that is WithdrawX. That always changes to a negative amount when I enter, I need it to be positive.

There are a ton of videos around but digging through them is more time consuming than I have. I am hoping someone can pinpoint me in the right direction for just the information I need to understand.

Thank you

q_lurker · Answer

My condolences on your loss.  Losing a parent is never easy.

Given:

* Your father kept all his investment info in Quicken
* You have never used Quicken, and
* Accounts have been transferred to beneficiaries and other housekeeping done

What do you expect to accomplish "cleaning up" his Quicken file?

Successor beneficiaries who have received assets (I believe) are starting fresh.  New basis, fewer shares (if split among several), their own accounts now rather than his.  They don't need his file or information (so I believe).  Tax prep folks likely don't need his file.

If you want to learn the program for carrying forward with your share of his estate, that might be a great honor to him.  You can possibly learn better by starting a new file with your share of investments and using his file as a reference tool, to see how he did things.

Don't make extra work for yourself if you don't need to.

One possible reason to do this clean up is if his estate is continuing in some form of a trust.

NotACPA · Answer

A WithdrawX is a negative amount in the account where it happens.  It reduces the cash in that account.  It's a Positive amount in the account where it's received.

The X part indicates that it's a transfer to another account in  Q.

Jim_Harman · Answer

If you are not sure what Action to use in an investing account, you can click on the account's Enter Transactions button and select from the dropdown list at the top. This gives a little more guidance than entering directly in the Transaction List (register). Unfortunately the choices are not in any logical order, except that most of the Cash operations are at the bottom of the list.

Some of the more complex transactions are only available in Enter Transactions.

For example, to transfer cash into an account from another Quicken account, you would select "Cash transferred into account" and fill in the requested information. If entering directly into the Transaction list, you would need to know to pick XIn and what to enter in each field.

If the cash is coming from outside of Quicken, you can scroll to the bottom of the list and pick Deposit.

Good luck!