Resetting a bunch of accounts with one financial firm?

David7

I have three investment accounts with a firm, and number of mutual funds in each account. They're way out of date. I have two questions:

1. I see how to download each fund's transactions, but I don't see how to say to download all at once. Is there a way?
2. Is there a way to reset the entire set of investments? To just tell quicken to ignore what's there and to download current status?

Thanks

Tom Young

It might be helpful to know the Financial Institution (FI) involved here. Different FI's can have different methods of downloading and/or various methods of downloading available, as well as different windows of the history of transactions you can get in the downloads. If someone here has accounts with your FI they probably can provide a more helpful, specific to your FI, answer.

The broad general answer to your "all at once question" is that you connect each Quicken Account to the FI for downloading and then kick off a download either as a One Step Update or "Update Transactions" in the Accounts pull-down Action menu (gearwheel). If it happens that all your Quicken Accounts with the FI have the same user ID and password then clicking on the Update Transactions in any of the Accounts will start downloads to all the Accounts.

But understand if the Accounts are older you probably won't get a complete history of transactions in those Accounts. A 90 window for historical transactions is common, though some FIs provide more than that.

I'm not sure if your #2 question if really two different questions ("reset" can mean different things to different people) but going with "To just tell quicken to ignore what's there and to download current status?" The answer to that question can be "Yes;" Before you instantiate any download you'd go to Preferences > Downloaded Transactions and make sure that no Accounts are selected in the "Compare Account Portfolio after Down." Quicken will download transactions as far back as the FI allows and WON'T compare balances in the Accounts (based on all transactions in the Account) and WON'T suggest a Placeholder to get the Accounts' share balances equal to what the shares your FI says you have. Probably not as helpful as allowing Quicken to create Placeholders which at least gets the number of shares in agreement.

David7

For privacy, I'm not listing the FI, but it's just a networked connection where I enter my login info for that institution. I did find the One Step Update in Tools, but that's not one step. It seems to download, then I have to go to every account to Accept the transactions. Then I get mismatches on some while others don't download anything though it's been more than a year. Even worse, some have the "Download Transaction" header for the last section at the bottom of the window, but you can't scroll down to see what's below, though I can see the top of a blue box (see below). It's not one-step, it's not easy, it's why I rarely bother with that feature, so I thought of starting over.

As for the second, where are Preferences? I don't see that in either the File or Tools menu.

NotACPA

Without the name of the FI, you've already gotten as much assistance as anyone can provide. We Can"t provide anything specific because the FI's all do things differently.

Tom Young

As an aside, for the life of me I can't see where disclosing the FI involved somehow is a privacy issue.

"It seems to download, then I have to go to every account to Accept the transactions."

The "One Step" aspect in One Step Update is that after properly setting it up one click of a button downloads from all connected Accounts in your file. That's it.

If you think that having to accept transactions in the Downloaded Transactions window into your Accounts is too much work then turn on automatic acceptance of downloaded transactions in each of the Accounts. I'll warn you in advance though, that chances are very high that any transaction that involves a Corporate Action - split, spin off, split off, mergers and the like - will be incorrect, at least from an accounting standpoint. And, as you have observed, the "matching" process isn't perfect and automatic acceptance doesn't change that. Perhaps with a first download for an Account that has significant transactions showing up there's more effort involved, but if you want to get things right it really does require some effort on your part.

"while others don't download anything though it's been more than a year." Not sure exactly what you're saying here. You may be bumping up against the fact that not every transaction since the time the account was opened is sent to Quicken. If you're saying that accounts have had recent transactions - less that 90 days from "today" say - and they are not showing up, that suggests something could be wrong in the set up.

"it's not easy, it's why I rarely bother with that feature, so I thought of starting over."

I've been using One Step Update for decades and I shudder to think of the work I'd have to go through if that feature vanished. It's just not realistic to think that you could go months (years?) at a time without doing anything on your part and then miraculously getting perfectly up to date with the occasional download. The fact of the matter is that if you financial life is at all complex then Quicken can't "do YOUR accounting FOR YOU" despite what Quicken (the company) might say or suggest. More realistically it helps "YOU do YOUR ACCOUNTING."

UKR

BTW, if the Downloaded Transactions tab is not tall enough to show a number of transactions plus a few buttons at the bottom …