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What's the best way to go about adding historical values for my 401(k) and IRAs?

sneff30

I'm adding offline 401(k) and IRA accounts for my wife and I and I only care about/plan to update balances on the first of every month.

I want to enter the share balance and price for the 1st of every month going back to the dates these accounts were opened, about 3 years. I've tried doing it with "Added" transactions but the account balance was inaccurate and it's incredibly cumbersome.

How would you all suggest I go about accomplishing this? My end goal is to have accurate net worth/balance tracking each month going back to the opening of these accounts. Thanks in advance.

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Comments

Tom Young

I'd say that Add actions - and maybe Remove actions - are the way to go here, maybe 36 of these actions for each security, starting at the date the account was opened. You can't really start at "today" and work backwards.

So if in the first month 10 shares of security A was purchased, and that's all that happened with security A, then a month end Add action gets you started. I you know the basis of those 10 shares you could include that in the Add, or not, as you see fit. If the next month a reinvested dividend added .3 shares, then the month end entry would be another Add for .3 shares, and so on. If nothing happened with Security A for the next 4 months, no entry is needed, Quicken will show 10.3 shares of security A for all of those months.

If a sale of some of those shares occurred the following month, a Remove will bring the share balance down to however many shares - if any - are left. The number of shares of security A at any month end will always be the sum of all the earlier transactions in the Account for security A.

splasher

It seems to me that you would need to "add" a transaction for each stock/fund each month in the amount that was a NEW addition for each stock/fund held in each account for that month.

There is nothing in Quicken that deals with the total amount for a stock/fund as a means of updating.

You could create a spreadsheet entering the month-end numbers and have it calculate the needed deltas from month to month to enter into Quicken.

Jim_Harman

If the securities are publicly traded, then Quicken will be able to download the share prices and recording the correct share balances at the end of the month will make the account balance correct. If they are special 401(k) funds, which often have "Trust" in their names, you will have to set the share prices in addition to the quantities.

If you don't care about the actual securities that were in the accounts in the past but just the account balances, you could create a fake security with a price of $1.00 and call it "Retirement Balance" or whatever. Each month you would Add or Remove enough shares in each account to make the account balances correct. That would be one transaction per account per month.

To avoid having to add and subtract to get the share balances correct, you can click on the gear at the top right of the account and select Update share balance. There you can set the date, security, and the correct balance and Quicken will put in and Added or Removed transaction as needed. If you use this method, you must start with the earliest date and work forward. Note that this is different from the Adjust share balance selection when you click on Enter Transactions. That creates Placeholders, which IMO produce all sorts of messiness.

fciani

If you are using actual stock/fund names that Quicken ultimately downloads and updates, the reason your account balances are out of balance is because you're using the 1st of every month as your standard while the daily prices are updated automatically by Quicken. Meanwhile, the reports are using the End of month values.

If you want monthly totals based upon stock prices, there is no way around manually adding/removing shares for each month. It is cumbersome, but once you catch up it isn't that hard to maintain.

I always get my brokerage accounts to tie out by manually by going to the 'Holdings Tab' and setting the date to the LAST day of the month and then adjust the security prices/share balances to match the account statement.

sneff30

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20409995#Comment_20409995

Thanks for the reply. This is what I was doing and I'm noticing now the reason it wasn't adding up is because, even though these are 401(k) specific funds, Quicken was updating their prices based on the Russell and S&P indices.

Thank you for the help.

sneff30

@splasher @Jim_Harman @fciani

Thanks for your replies. Like I said to Tom, Quicken was erroneously pulling price data for the securities leading to an inaccurate present value balance.

Appreciate your assistance.