Incorrect Vanguard holdings reported by Quicken Mac

FI Wizard
FI Wizard Member ✭✭
edited February 12 in Investing (Mac)

First issue: Back-door Roth IRAs

Contributed $7K from joint brokerage account settlement funds to 2x Traditional IRA accounts for me and my spouse. Once those funds cleared, we performed back-door Roth conversions on Jan 3rd or so.

Quicken Mac never picked up on the conversion and still shows $7K held in the settlement fund in each of the traditional IRA accounts. The Roth account balances & holdings are reported correctly.

Second issue: Failure to report 529 holdings correctly

This next issue goes back several months. I posted about it here in another thread that has since been closed, and I am revisiting the issue and attaching screenshots to aid in describing the issue.

Two kids, and ee hold (2) 529 securities in each of their accounts: 1) An age based "Vanguard Target Enrollment Portfolio", and also 2) "Vanguard Growth Index Portfolio".

Quicken does not report these holdings correctly. Today 529 Account #1 only shows the Target Enrollment holdings, but 529 Account #2 reports them both correctly. At other times only the target enrollment portfolio will be show in either 529 account balances, but never does Quicken report the correct balances and holdings for both 529 accounts.

If I attempt to re-link the accounts Quicken will momentarily tease me the correct balances on the Add Account popup window, but the balances never come over correctly. I have removed and re-linked these two accounts multiple times without the issue correcting itself. See below.

529 Account #1: Correct balance

529 Account #2: Correct balance

Incorrect balance reported after import:

I contacted Quicken support several months ago on the issue. The support person only recommended I try linking the account again at a later time.

Answers

  • jacobs
    jacobs Quicken Mac Subscription SuperUser, Mac Beta Beta

    Quicken Mac never picked up on the conversion and still shows $7K held in the settlement fund in each of the traditional IRA accounts. The Roth account balances & holdings are reported correctly.

    So you're saying that the deposit into the Roth account appeared, but the withdrawal from the Traditional IRA did not? That has to be a problem with what Vanguard downloaded to Quicken. Out of curiosity, was this just a transfer of securities between accounts, or did you actually sell shares of the securities, transfer cash, and purchase new securities? If the former, you could delete whatever transaction Vanguard created, and then use a Transfer Shares transaction to move the correct number of shares from the Traditional IRA to the Roth account. But since this is a transfer between retirement accounts and cost basis of the securities is irrelevant, it could be done with Remove Shares and Add Shares transactions, or by Sell, Transfer, and Buy transactions.

    Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 1993
  • FI Wizard
    FI Wizard Member ✭✭

    This was a conversion. After contributing to the traditional IRA I had Vanguard convert the funds to Roth. Vanguard effectively zeroes out the tax deferred IRA account balance and moves the dollars to the Roth account.

    Unless I am misunderstanding your suggestion, I cannot delete the transactions, nor create any new ones due to the limitations of Quicken Mac: If I want to keep the accounts linked to Vanguard, I must use Simple Investment tracking methodology.

  • MontanaKarl
    MontanaKarl Quicken Mac Subscription Member, SuperUser, Mac Beta Beta

    not totally following, but if Vanguard journaled the funds for the conversion and the journal entry didn’t get downloaded into Quicken properly so that the original amount is still showing… I would think that you would just edit the “deposit” side in the Roth registers to show as a transfer from the taxable IRA account. If that doesn’t result in the reporting you need, then you can enter a transaction with category Adjustment to remove the cash balance from the IRA.

    Quicken user since 1990, MacBook Pro M2 Max on Sequoia 15.3.1 (and Win 11 under Parallels Desktop)

  • jacobs
    jacobs Quicken Mac Subscription SuperUser, Mac Beta Beta
    edited January 12

    Ah, Simple Investing. If that's what you're using, then you're correct that you can't change the transactions because Quicken isn't storing transactions and is only reporting balances it gets from Vanguard. But you might want to change your connection to Direct Connect so you can have detailed tracking. Several users have posted how they did this. Here's one — starting with the key that you must select "Vanguard" (not Vanguard Personal Investors" or any of the other Vanguard instances):

    As for the Roth conversion, my question was how they did the transfer of funds: did they sell the original shares, move the cash, and buy new shares, or did they just move the shares from one account to the other. Quicken Mac can handle it either way (and as I said, it doesn't really matter because you don't need to retain the original cost basis and date of acquisition).

    Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 1993
  • FI Wizard
    FI Wizard Member ✭✭

    How do I edit the deposit side in the Roth registers?

  • jacobs
    jacobs Quicken Mac Subscription SuperUser, Mac Beta Beta

    How do I edit the deposit side in the Roth registers?

    You can't enter transactions if you're using Simple investment tracking; you'd need to switch to Detail tracking to be able to enter transactions. See my post above.

    Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 1993
  • FI Wizard
    FI Wizard Member ✭✭

    I wasn't being literal. I was confused by the recommendations I was reading from the Mac SuperUsers because I've been led to think / believe that Quicken Mac ONLY offered Simple investment tracking for linked accounts.

    So I updated my connections and switched to Vanguard and voila now I have detailed investment tracking! Amazing. However, The Roth register is not correct recognizing the $7K transfers from the Traditional IRAs, and instead shows them as check deposits from my one of my bank checking accounts. The traditional IRA accounts were not brought in at all, potentially because they are zero balance accounts?

    The Vanguard Direct Connection does not bring in account data whatsoever for the 529 accounts.

    Is it possible to get detailed investment tracking from Fidelity as well?

  • Jon
    Jon Quicken Mac Subscription SuperUser, Mac Beta Beta

    Yes, Fidelity offers detailed tracking.

  • jacobs
    jacobs Quicken Mac Subscription SuperUser, Mac Beta Beta

    Glad you got switched over to detailed investment tracking for your Vanguard accounts. My advice above was to delete any transactions from the Roth conversion which are causing incorrect holdings in Quicken, and create them manually, either doing Transfer Shares from the traditional to Roth account, or creating Add Shares transactions if you just need to create the holdings in the Roth account. It's up to you if it's worth going back in time to create the traditional IRA account transactions for completeness, so you have a historic trail of the funds from non-retirement account to traditional IRA account to Roth IRA account… or just get the current holdings accurate to move forward.

    Is it possible to get detailed investment tracking from Fidelity as well?

    I don't have a Fidelity account, but I'm pretty certain you can do Direct Connect with detail tracking for Fidelity.

    Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 1993
  • MontanaKarl
    MontanaKarl Quicken Mac Subscription Member, SuperUser, Mac Beta Beta
    edited January 12

    What @jacobs said. Sorry, I didn't realize you were on Simple investment tracking. (Personally, I'm not sure why Simple even exists.)

    Quicken user since 1990, MacBook Pro M2 Max on Sequoia 15.3.1 (and Win 11 under Parallels Desktop)

  • FI Wizard
    FI Wizard Member ✭✭

    What I understand now that I did not over the prior 6-months is that Simple investment tracking was only a limitation so long as you did not have Direct Connections enabled. I was under the impression that Direct Connections were services paid for by institutions.

    I've been very frustrated with my Quicken experience because of how limited Quicken felt without transaction level details. As of now I have Direct connections to Vanguard & Fidelity for brokerage accounts, and Fidelity Netbenefits for 401K accounts. Thank you!

    Am I correct in thinking that Vanguard does not support direct connections for their 529 accounts? Any thoughts why the balances from those 529 accounts dont transmit correctly when using Simple investing tracking via the Vanguard Personal connection?

This discussion has been closed.