Balance report does not match account balance

Science101

I realize that this topic has been discussed in various ways, but I have a slightly different problem with the balance and net worth reports not matching the value in the ledgers. I have followed the advice of stepping back the dates to isolate the discrepancy. This occurs with the entry of the first Short Sale followed by CvrShrt. The account balance of course, increases with the short sale credit, and is then reduced when the short sale is covered. The ledger in account correctly reports the balance after CvrShrt, but the balance report is not recognizing the CvrShrt and is calculating the balance based on the short sale still open, when in fact this short sale and all others have been closed. Reentering the transactions for CvrShrt does not help as it seems the Balance report will only accept Buy and Sold but not CvrShrt. All entries and dashboard show correct balances.

Science101

Since my question above, no one has commented, so I will continue the discussion with myself.

I have performed an experiment related to the above problem with the Net Worth and Balances Report not matching the investment register balances. I stepped back in the account to a day prior to the first short sale where the discrepancy occurs and entered a dummy transaction: Bought 100 shares @ $1.

In the original situation, the Share Balance was 0 for the particular security to begin and after a short sale the Share Balance became a negative number (as expected with short sales) until the CvrShrt transaction returned it to zero; by adding dummy shares prior to the short sale, the Share Balance never became negative in spite of short sales. After accounting for the "cost" of the dummy shares, the account ledger, Net Worth, and Balances Reports were now in perfect agreement!

I have read that the Balance Report module draws amounts from the database and performs calculations e.g. number shares x share price to arrive at Balances Report independently of the account ledger. There apparently is a bug where the Balance Report module cannot handle a negative share balance and hangs at that point. This can be demonstrated by the above experiment and would be the basis for a work around of sorts except that buying dummy shares to trick the buggy balances into alignment results in a totally false account entry and totals, etc.

I know this problem is unusual and does not affect many users , but it is a correctable error. Some of the problems with Balance report could be due to inadvertent negative share balance numbers due to transaction entry error, etc. Hopefully some small change in the software code could allow negative share balances to be trapped or handled correctly.

QuickUserPSP

@Science101 - your example and explanation make perfect sense and you are correct it is a seemingly simple programming fix. But, here is the issue, I am not sure what avenue would be appropriate for you to take to submit this issue for review. You could submit a "Report a problem" under Help, but it is not clear that your issue would be looked at or not.

You could call Quicken Support, but in my opinion, your chances there of getting anyone that would understand your issue is very low. And I doubt they would escalate an issue they can't replicate or decipher from their Quicken log files.

In my opinion, the appropriate person to ultimately escalate this issue to would be a Quicken programmer. But there is no way to know how this is done, or what the appropriate avenue would be to get an issue to a programmer.

In the off chance that a moderator will take notice of the issue you describe and submit it to the proper channels is pretty hit or miss.

This is the biggest frustration I see with Quicken users. There is no documented protocol on how issues are submitted by users. No standard escalation process that is adhered to. And since there is no follow up, the user is left hanging and frustrated, not knowing if their issue was truly given consideration, or put in the circular file.

Jim_Harman

@Science101 Have you tried your test case in a test file, I.e starting with zero shares, enter a short sale followed by a cover short for the same number of shares?

Does this look OK in the account Holdings view but cause errors in the Account Balance and Net Worth reports? Of course closing out the short position should change the cash balance in the account if there is a gain or a loss.

If the problem is easily repeatable that will get more interest from the Moderators.

I am away from my computer or I would try it myself.

Also if there is a Placeholder in the account for this security that will prevent the cash balance from changing.

Jim_Harman

Also in the reports are you running the default reports or ones that you have saved? Do you see the same issue with the default reports?

Make sure that No Security (includes cash) is selected on the Securities customization tab or the cash impact of your transactions will be missing from the report.