Resolving issue with investment accounts after converting from QWin to QMac

Question

I just converted my QWin data file to QMac.  Everything other than the investment accounts transferred over correctly.

With investment accounts, in a significant number of investment accounts with $0 cash balances in QWin, after conversion they report as having a positive or negative cash balance in QMac. The share balances are correct in QMac (they should be 0 and are).

Digging deeper, I can see that what is happening is that some (but not all) SoldX and BuyX transactions in QWin were converted to Sold and Buy transactions in QMac (expected behavior) but no cash transfer was recorded in QMac.

I have way too many SoldX and BuyX to manually search for & deal with the ones that didn't correctly come over with the appropriate cash transfers being generated.

Interestingly, all currently active investment accounts with holdings came over just fine and the SoldX and BuyX transactions were converted correctly.

These old, no longer used investment accounts were hidden in QWin (both for transaction entry and in the account list), so I decided to try to unhide the accounts in QWin and try the conversion again, but the results were identical. The incorrect cash balances in the second conversion match exactly the incorrect cash balances in the first conversion.

All of these currently unused investment accounts are at least a decade old, some of them over 20 years old, and I really don't care if everything is correct with them, and whether reports would be exactly correct.

I was thinking of handling the issue by going into the old investment accounts with incorrect cash balances in QMac and just do a reconcile and set the cash balances to $0.

What I'd like to know from those more experience than I am is where there will be unintended consequences for taking this action. How will this affect reports or anything else?

camner · Answer

I know QMac doesn't have BuyX & SellX transactions, but the conversion process is supposed to convert each BuyX & SellX transaction into two transactions: a Buy or Sell transaction followed by a cash transfer transaction. In fact, this happens much of the time. In looking at the QMac file after conversion, I can see that a significant number of BuyX & SellX transactions in my QWin data file did, indeed, get converted to a Buy or Sell transaction followed by a cash transfer transaction.

BUT, a significant number of BuyX & SellX transactions did NOT get converted to two transactions. The conversion process simply changed some of the BuyX or SellX transactions to a Buy or Sell, but then didn't create the necessary second, cash transfer transaction.

Why the conversion process does it correctly much of the time, but also fails to do it correctly much of the time, is something I don't have the expertise to understand.

Jon · Answer

Quicken Mac doesn't have BuyX & SellX transactions, so you will need to add a transfer for each one to restore the movement of money between accounts.

camner · Answer

Thanks for the quick replies!

I checked, and I don't have any "Show cash in a checking account" type of accounts.

Poking around more, I realized that the SoldX and BuyX transactions that were missing the cash transfer were between investment accounts that no longer have share balances; the SoldX and BuyX transactions that were between investment accounts and banking accounts seem to have the cash transfer transaction generated during the conversion.