Placeholders

crescere

I know that you in the Quicken Community think that placeholders are God. I do not. I don't want them or ask for them. How do I stop them?

Chris_QPW

I don't know where you got the idea that the "Quicken Community" thinks placeholders are a good idea. Every SuperUser recommends avoiding them like the plague.

Placeholders are created when the downloaded summary information (which comes with the downloaded transactions) disagrees with what is in your Quicken register AND when the compare is done.

In theory you should be able to turn off the "compare" part of this, therefore even getting to the point where Quicken would suggest a placeholder.

Edit → Preferences → Downloaded transactions → "Compare account portfolio after download" Settings, and deselect all the accounts on that list.

Tom Young

OR, leave the "compare" turned on and on that same screen turn off "Automatically add to Investment Transaction List."

If there is an actual difference between holdings you'll be alerted to the fact and can investigate. If there really is no difference beyond a timing difference that you know will self-correct simply dismiss that placeholder.

Chris_QPW

@Tom Young it is my belief that @crescere isn't using "Automatically add to Investment Transaction List", because I believe if you are using that mode, you will never get placeholders because the "compare" will never be done.

Let me start by saying that I don't recommend the "Automatically add to Investment Transaction List" mode to the average person because there are bugs in it that they have never fixed. For instance, if you have a "near match" you will have to switch out of that mode just to see the downloaded transaction hidden in the Downloaded Transactions tab.

But because of the history, and what I would consider another bug in this mode the compare is never done.

Way back before for option to turn off compare for each investment account existed if the user was in "Automatically add to Investment Transaction List" mode if there was a difference you would get a placeholder and because there was no prompt the user had no way to block the this. So, people complained, and their "solution" was to turn off the compare when in this mode. And that is the case to this day even though in my opinion what should have really happened is the prompting of the user or some option to choose what to do, and certainly the new option to decide to do the compare or not should still be used in this mode. But none of that is true.

So, with that history and current use it is my assumption that they aren't in that mode. There have also been reports of a bug where Quicken will put in placeholders even when using the Downloaded Transactions tab without prompting asking if they want to do that. And so that is what I think is happening in this case.

Hopefully @crescere will come back and report on exactly what is the case.

Chris_QPW

Let me say that because I know how to workaround the bugs in the "Automatically add to Investment Transaction List" mode I do use it and here is my procedure. First off, let me say that I don't have the "near match" because I don't pre-enter any transactions.

1. Download transactions.
2. Go to each account that has a blue dot indicating new transactions and review them for being correct.
3. I have three customized action buttons, the first one is "Reconcile Shares". This is in fact the "compare". If they different I get the dialogs I will post at the end of this (no automatic placeholders are applied).
4. The second action button is "Update Cash Balance". I don't select that actually update the cash balance I select it to see what Quicken got for the online balance to see if it is different or the same. I can also copy out what Quicken has for the balance to use for the next step which is reconciling the cash.
5. The last action button is "Reconcile". When there isn't any problems like a difference in what the online balance downloaded I would past in the ending cash balance from step #4 and finish that reconcile.

Screenshots for #3:

One has to select Details to even see a choice for placeholders (selecting Done doesn't cause the use of placeholders, see next dialog).

I'm not sure if the "Ignore for now" is "sticky" or just always defaults to ignore, but this is what I get. As you can see it extremely difficult to "accidentally get placeholders".

Here are the dialogs for the other steps.

#4

#5