Quicken 401k Account Keeps Defaulting to Canadian currency.

macrobb

Good afternoon,

I have the following setup:

• Windows 11 Enterprise
• Quicken Classic Premier (US Version)
• Version R55.26
• Used Quicken since 2009

The currency is set to Canadian. I have a number of accounts in US dollars. My employer just switched to 401k administrators, and now it is with Fidelity. I have attempted multiple ways to get the 401k to come into Quicken. However, it either comes in as Canadian currency (there is no way to switch it), or I can't link it if I manually set up a USD account. I have tried multiple different approaches with no luck.

• setting it up with Fidelity - comes in as Canadian currency
• manually setting up 401k, brokerage, other accounts - it either won't link (can't select the account from the drop-down)

I tried to call support today, but they are closed until Monday.This should be easy; select the account currency and be done. But that is not an option. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

macrobb

Good evening,

I spent time with customer support. They triaged several different methods. Here are the steps that finally worked:

• Tools - Currency - Update theHome Currency to USD - click Home
• Tools - Add Account (follow the steps to process the download. The account was imported in USD.
• Tools - Currency - Update theHome Currency to CND - click Home

None of my existing accounts were impacted, and I am now successfully connecting to Fidelity.

Thank you everyone for your assistance.

Chris_QPW

I'm extremely surprised that you can connect to a Fidelity account using Quicken Windows Canadian, from what I see that isn't supported at all.

macrobb

I have the US version of Quicken (not the Canadian version). Fifty percent of my accounts are in Canadian currency, and fifty percent are in US currency. I am just trying to add another US Account From Fidelity (my new 401(K) provider). I haven't needed to do this in about 18 months, so I'm not sure why I can't do it.

Chris_QPW

Ok, it is just that you entered this into the Windows Canadian category. I will ask the Moderator to move it to the right category.

Quicken Kristina

Hello @macrobb,

To assist with this issue, please provide more information. Is this the only account behaving this way? Do you have any other accounts with Fidelity? If so, are they under the same UserID/Password, and which currency are they? When you go to Tools>Currency List, which currency shows as your Home currency?

Unfortunately, once an investment account is added/set up in Quicken, there is no way to change which currency the account uses. See this article for more information.

The most likely causes of the issue you're seeing are either the financial institution is sending the wrong information to us or there's a file-specific problem causing the account to show the wrong currency. To check for file-specific issues that may cause this, I suggest that you try validating and/or super validating your data file.  Please save a backup file prior to performing these steps.

Validate: 

1. File
2. Validate and Repair File...
3. Validate File
4. Click OK
5. Close the Data Log
6. Close Quicken (leave it closed for at least 5 secs)
7. Reopen Quicken and see if the issue persists.

If the issue persists, proceed to Super Validate. If the issue is resolved after performing validation, then please disregard the instructions to Super Validate.

Super Validate:

1. File
2. Hold CTRL + Shift and click Validate and Repair File...
3. Super Validate File
4. Click OK
5. Close the Data Log
6. Close Quicken (leave it closed for at least 5 secs)
7. Reopen Quicken and see if the issue persists.   

Please let me know how it goes!

macrobb

Good morning,

I have tried the validation (both - regular and super). Here are the results of the super validation:

QDF:
Validating your data.
No errors.

QEL:
No read errors.

QEL:
All internal consistency checks passed.

I attempted it after that, but when I connected to Fidelity, it defaulted to Canadian currency (not US currency).

Quicken Kristina

Thank you for your reply,

Since the Validate/Super Validate did not correct the issue, the next step is to restore a backup from before the issue started and test to see if the issue persists in the newly restored file.

If the issue persists, please let me know so we can continue troubleshooting!

macrobb

Good evening,

I spent time with customer support. They triaged several different methods. Here are the steps that finally worked:

• Tools - Currency - Update theHome Currency to USD - click Home
• Tools - Add Account (follow the steps to process the download. The account was imported in USD.
• Tools - Currency - Update theHome Currency to CND - click Home

None of my existing accounts were impacted, and I am now successfully connecting to Fidelity.

Thank you everyone for your assistance.

Quicken Kristina

Thank you for the follow up,

I'm glad to hear it's working now, and thank you for sharing the solution!

If you need further assistance, please feel free to reach out!

mshiggins

[The following is based on Quicken U.S. Release 55.26]

I don't have any foreign currency accounts, so I have no experience with them. But based on my understanding of Quicken's intended treatment of foreign currency, I think there is something haywire with Quicken.

In a test file, I turned on multi-currency support and set my Home currency to U.S. Dollar.

I created a 401k account and told Quicken to use Canadian Dollar for the account currency.

When I looked in the Account Bar, the newly created "Canadian Dollar" 401k account had a U.S. Dollar "$" to the left of the 401k account name.

Then I changed the Home currency to Canadian Dollar and created a new 401k account telling Quicken to make the account currency U.S. dollars.

That account appeared in the Account Bar with a Canadian Dollar "C" to the left of the 401k account name.

So it appears that Quicken is ignoring the currency specified when creating a new account, and always giving the new account the Home currency. That doesn't seem right to me.

For possible relief:

Normally, once a Quicken account has been created, its currency can't be changed. And Quicken seems to respect that when the Home currency is changed.  I changed the Home currency in my test file and the currency of the existing accounts did not appear to change (I concentrated on the two test 401k accounts - I could have missed something).

So one possible workaround for the problem of this discussion is to change the Home currency to the currency desired for the new 401k account, create the new 401k account, then switch the Home currency back to its desired value.

Caution should be taken if/when trying the above workaround: when the Home currency is changed Quicken displays a warning that the currency of existing accounts may be changed. And I did not check every account in the file when I tested changing the Home currency.

For protection, either: backup to a secure location (not the regular backup location) before trying the workaround, or make a Windows Copy of the Quicken data file (with a different file name) and test in that.

-JP