OLD placeholders - can't fully reconcile

EmKay

I wanted to clean up ALL old unreconciled transactions in my accounts, just to tie up loose ends.

I have a Roth IRA with Vanguard that I believe went through at least a couple of "transitions" - from the old platform to the new, and I think I may have had a download issue that resulted in me creating a new account in Quicken and copying transactions into it from an old account in Quicken.

So now I have a "defunct" Quicken account for this Vanguard Roth with placeholders that I cannot match to transactions even if I log onto Vanguard and run a transaction history report - I guess I didn't fully reconcile when I created the new/current Quicken account for this Roth, and I closed and hid the account and only rediscovered it recently.

The data is from an unknown time, up to 2015.

I would like to fully reconcile, even though it may not be necessary, if it's possible.

How would I handle these placeholders if I don't really know the price of the holding or exactly when it was sold? Or should I just ignore it?

Tom Young

"The data is from an unknown time, up to 2015."

I don't understand that sentence. You know when the account at Vanguard was created, I'd think, so are you saying that when you created the Account in Quicken, created some time after the account came into existence at Vanguard, you simply entered some "opening balance" numbers based on the most recent statement?

If that's the case and if by "fully reconcile" you're referring to having a perfect history of transactions in the Quicken Account, transactions that create month end balances that can be reconciled to each Vanguard statement from the time the account was created, then there's really no way to do this other than making sure that every transaction, as reported by Vanguard, is properly entered into Quicken. That's certainly doable, but it probably would be a significant amount of work.

"Placeholders" generally can't be easily matched directly to specific "transactions" as the placeholders represent positions (holdings) at specific points in time, representing the net sum of ALL transactions in a specific security from the time the account was created at Vanguard up to the date of the placeholder and that can easily amount to hundreds of transactions from that unknown time to the date of the Placeholder. So Placeholders resolve themselves, i.e., can be deleted, only when the sum of all those transactions in Quicken come to the specific Placeholder number of shares or cash balance.

So to your "if it's possible" question the answer is "Yes", but it's going to take a not inconsiderable amount of work, an effort that requires close attention to detail and access to all transactions that have ever been recorded in the IRA.

If your current Account in Quicken is in good shape, i.e., you started with good opening positions and each month reconciles properly to Vanguard's records, and given that usually the "details" aren't that important in an IRA, you might decide it's not worth your time and effort to go back and try to fix that old Account.