Market Value doesn't match reality, how to adjust? [Edited]
The market value on an investment account is out of balance with the true market value. It is a very active account and searching through all transactions is difficult. Is there a simple way of adjusting the market value to be back in balance?
Answers
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Market value is the sum of, for each position in the account, all of the individual market values.
The market value for each position is the number of units/shares times the value of each unit.
SO, either the number of units or the value of each unit is wrong.\
Pull out your statement and examine each position to determine if the number of units/shares is correct. If so, then the value is incorrect. You can correct the value (quote) by going to the Portfolio, right clicking on a security name and clicking "Price History"
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It depends on how much you care about Quicken being able to track the performance of your account and the securities in it, your asset allocation, and the tax implications of any sales.
If you don't care about these things and you just want to be able to see the balance of the account, you could simply update the cash balance of the account to match the correct market value.
Another option would be to change the account to Simple investing mode, where Quicken does not track the individual transactions but adds and removes shares and adjusts the cash balance to match the summary information provided by the broker. To do this, click on the gear at the top right of the account, select Edit Account Details, and change the Tracking Method to Simple - Positions only. Note that if you choose this option and later decide to return to complete tracking, you will have to enter the missing transactions manually.
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Thank you for the answer. The problem is the value of each of the securities is correct. The account balance is off but the Cash is in balance and each security has the correct price but the Market Value in the account does not equal the Market of value of each security added up with the correct current price. How can that balance be adjusted??
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Jim et al - thank you. It would be nice if Quicken allowed you to Reconcile Market Value like it does with Cash so you could keep the accounts in balance.
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Thanks for the added detail.
Is the market value off by a large amount or just by a few dollars, as might be caused by accumulated roundoff errors?
Also to compare the market value to a statement, make sure the date in Quicken matches the statement date. Click on Holdings and set the As of date to the statement date.
If you are downloading transactions for the account, have you tried clicking on the gear and selecting Reconcile Shares? That will compare your current share balances in Quicken to the balances reported by your broker and give you the opportunity to create Placeholders to force the balances to match. Many of us don't like Placeholders because they paper over missing or incorrect transactions and prevent Quicken from accurately tracking your performance and capital gains, but they are a quick and dirty way of forcing the share balances to match.
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When you get down to it even if Quicken supplied a built in reconcile the basic process would be the same, reconcile the shares first, and then the cash.
Provided that the financial institution downloads the information correctly there is already a way to do this in two steps, one of which might even be kicked off automatically.
This is where to set the "compare" to be done automatically after each download. I personally want to do this manually, so I have none selected here. What this does is compare the number of shares of each security in the account to what was downloaded. If they don't match it puts up a dialog that points out which ones don't match. It is at that point you have to figure out what transactions are wrong (if done properly) and just like in a cash reconcile, if there are missing/added/wrong transaction you really have to deal with that in the register. If you are basically going to "not reconcile" the placeholders are basically the same as doing a balance adjustment to avoid actually reconciling a cash amount. Along with the problems that @Jim_Harman pointed out (and the same for ignoring being able to reconcile a cash amount).
My process is like this:
I have these three in my Action Bar:
Reconcile Shares… kicks off the same compare as above.
If they compare:
If they don't:
Hopefully you get the first one.
Then "Update Cash Balance", I don't actually use this to update the cash balance, what it does is tell me if the cash balance that the financial institution sent, and one Quicken has is the same (which I will use in the next dialog). Right now, they are out of balance because I purposely deleted a buy to show this.
I really should be out of balance at this point for any "security transaction", a cash transaction might throw it off though.
Provided this was in fact correct then I would copy the amount from the first box and then close this dialog select the last one which is reconcile:
Here I can paste in the amount from the other dialog into the ending balance and do the actual cash reconcile:
But getting back to this statement:
This seems impossible unless some there is some kind of corruption. It should be impossible for each security be correct and the Market value wrong. You said, "correct price", but you didn't say "correct number of shares". Have you check that?
The "Reconcile shares"/compare to what the financial institution has is exactly that a comparison between the number of shares between what Quicken has and the financial institution has.
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Chris, your first screenshot is wrong. I think you should be showing how to get to Reconcile Shares.
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@Chris_QPW I also wanted to point out that the Reconcile box automatically pops up after every transaction download if you have "Reconcile using online balance" checked, on the Online Services tab.
As far as I can determine this only happens on newer investment accounts.
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Yeah, I turned that off because it doesn't work right, which is a shame. And it is popping up at all is sort of partly my fault.
The check box has been there forever, but until recently it was ignored. I think originally it was just that the same dialog was used for non-investment accounts and not hidden.
Anyways a while back I noted in a post that in fact Quicken does know the online balance and as such could make this functional. In fact, this is the same cash balance used for the new Simple investing mode.
But when it started working (without any mention of it in the release notes) I immediately saw that it wasn't going to work because of "timing" and bugs.
The "timing" is probably my fault for not specifying what was needed better and because they didn't even follow what was already in the non-investment accounts.
That setting is "misleading", and they implement "too much'. If you look at the non-investment accounts you will see there is in fact two settings "Reconcile to online balance" and "Automatically reconcile". I really was asking for only the first option. As in when I start a cash reconcile They should have automatically put the online balance in and go to the reconcile dialog. But they implemented it as if both of those settings were on. This is just not going to work for investment accounts. For investment accounts you always have to go through reconciling the shares first. And they didn't do that. You can have the wrong amount of shares and after the download it will go to the cash reconcile. This is never going to work. Besides the simple fact that for different use cases you need to have a way to set both options separately.
The other bug I found was that it would do "automatic reconcile kick off" only on one account per download. And like I said it was really a good flow anyways. So, unless they fix it, which I doubt because no one is using it or complaining about it, then people need to just leave it off.
In the past I would point out many such bugs, but I have just given up on reporting the "annoying ones" that are "mainstream", because they are just never going to be addressed.
It is one of the frustrating parts of using a feature like automatic transaction entry mode. It is set to be on for the new users for non-investment accounts. but not investment accounts, so for non-investment accounts it is "sort of mainstream", but all the SuperUsers are going to just on any problem as "stop using it". So, why would Quicken Inc actually fix a problem that the "fix" is to stop using it?
This gets even more true when you talk about using it in investment accounts. For the most part it works there, but there is a bug in it, but it is pointless to point it out because the answer by the SuperUsers is just "then don't use it".
This really goes for a lot of Quicken, and I'm not blameless in this too. Sync to Mobile/Web mess up your data file? Stop using it. Quicken Bill Manager is messed up? Stop using it.
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@Chris_QPW - I chuckled a bit while I was reading your post. I like the "new" automatic investment account reconcile box. Most of the time I just cancel out of it, but some of the times it does come in handy. I can see were if would be most useful for a user that downloads and reconciles once a month to their monthly statement.
As for Mobile & Web, I started seriously using Quicken on the Web recently and I really like it. I foresee this web version replacing the desktop version down the road. There are few bugs, nothing major, just "annoying ones" as you put it.
What I discovered is that most users who don't want to use Mobile & Web and turn off Syncing to avoid issues, are doing the exact opposite of what they should and are really causing more issues for themselves. What I learned is that syncing needs to be turn on, and if you don't want your accounts to be shown on mobile or web, you should turn off syncing at the account level.
I never used Quicken's Bill Manager. I really didn't have a need for it. I used Bank Bill Pay through Quicken (DC) and used my bank's bill pay. Now I don't use any bill pay at all. I have all my bills and payments automatically taken by the payee.
I know that users are always wanting more features, but I think that Quicken also needs to "slim down" a bit. When I look at the files in the Quicken folder, I see a lot of old files from the Intuit days, that are obviously no longer used, but for some reason still included in the install file.
I really do think that Quicken needs to move to a 100% web program. If they can emulate most of the desktop product, I think it would be a "win-win" for Quicken and Quicken users.
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I really do think that Quicken needs to move to a 100% web program. If they can emulate most of the desktop product, I think it would be a "win-win" for Quicken and Quicken users.
I really think that is Quicken Inc's plan, but not the way you think. Quicken Simplifi is where it is at. Not a companion to Quicken Desktop.
Look up what color is the Quicken logo on this page? Now look at the icon on Quicken "Classic" (got to love that name, because it tells you a lot). Do you know what color is used for Quicken Simplifi?
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@Chris_QPW I think you are right. Quicken might be gently pushing users to accept the idea of an online product. I have gone through a conversion of a desktop program to 100% web based one. The programmers emulated the desktop program as much as they could. At first, users resisted the idea, but it turned out to be the best thing for everyone. Updates were simpler and easily disseminated. The programmers and IT could maintain better control over the program and uniformity. And ultimately to the end-user being a 100% web based program made no difference.
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