Quicken won't allow investment account balace to change

rmcaine

I am using Quicken Business & Personal Version R58.14 Build 27.1.58.14 in Windows 11 Enterprise.

On September 20th, I downloaded account information for new IRA accounts. The download created the account holdings without any transactions. This generated "place holder" transactions.

Today, I transfers stocks from an existing account to the new account which worked fine. I then created sell and buy transactions to get the account up-to-date. For every sell transaction an 'XOut' transaction was generated for the same amount to keep the balance the same. For buy transactions, except 1, 'XIn' transactions were generated to keep the balance the same.

If I delete the XOut or XIn transaction, the corresponding sell or buy transaction is also deleted.

I guess the question is why is Quicken trying to force the account balance to stay the same and how do I stop it?

I did the exact same thing to 3 other new accounts yesterday and this did not help. Support has hung up on my twice when I ask this question.

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Jim_Harman

What you are seeing is a side effect of the Placeholders.

Placeholders compensate for missing or incorrect investing transactions by forcing Quicken’s share balance for a security to match a specified value on the date of the Placeholder. This is usually the share count downloaded from your financial institution (FI).

Placeholders also prevent new transactions like Div, Bought and Sold prior to the security’s Placeholder date from affecting the account’s cash balance. It does this by creating a linked Cash Balance Adjustment just before the affected transaction. Deleting one of these will delete them both. This shows up as N/A in the Cash Amt column of the transaction list. 

To allow the cash balance to change when entering missing transactions that affect the cash balance, you must first delete all the Placeholders for this security that have later dates than the transaction you are entering. Because of this, if you are entering a series of missing transactions it will be easiest to work in reverse chronological order. Once you have deleted the Placeholders, you can also delete any Balancing Cash Adjustments.

I have never understood why Placeholders prevent the cash balance from changing.

Always back up your data file before changing historical transactions.

For more information on resolving placeholders, please see this FAQ:

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7267839/quicken-faq-managing-placeholder-entries-in-quicken-for-windows