Quicken Classic Deluxe – 401k Balance Doubling After Switching to “Simple – Positions Only” Mode

Jkreit70

In Quicken Classic Deluxe, I recently changed the tracking method for my 401k account (held with Fidelity NetBenefits) to “Simple – Positions Only,” as I don’t need to track individual transactions for this account. However, after making this change, I’m noticing that the account balance is being doubled during updates.

Specifically, Quicken displays both the positions and their market value, and a cash amount equal to the total value of the positions — resulting in the account value being doubled. When I manually adjust the cash balance to zero, the correction holds temporarily, but the incorrect cash balance reappears after the next update.

This issue does not occur with my wife’s 401k account, which is held at a different brokerage.

How can I fix this so that the cash value is not incorrectly added to the account's total balance?

Jim_Harman

This is a well known problem with Fidelity Net Benefits accounts, and has been reported many times.

The only workaround I know is to change the Tracking Method to Complete.

I think this is caused by Fidelity downloading Incorrect data, but I doubt they will admit it. Your best bet would probably be to work with Quicken Support to see if they can get this fixed.

Quicken Jasmine

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7962386/quicken-classic-deluxe-401k-balance-doubling-after-switching-to-simple-positions-only-mode

Thanks for reaching out!

Do you have any manual transactions that you created to zero out the balance? Also, would you mind providing some screenshots of the transactions within this account?

If needed, please refer to this Community FAQ for instructions on how to attach a screenshot. Alternatively, you can also drag and drop screenshots to your response if you are not given the option to add attachments. Please remember to redact any personal information as needed.

Thanks!

Jim_Harman

Here is the earliest reference I could find to this issue - January 2022. There are at least 20 other discussions of this and a lot of "Me too"s, but I see no acknowledgement from Quicken, other than a request to report via Report a Problem.

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7905125/fidelity-401k-cash-balance-duplicating-my-worth

Chris_QPW

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20490411#Comment_20490411

Originally, I was totally convinced that it was Vanguard's data, but two things have made me question that.

1. It isn't only Vanguard. People on different financial institutions are having the problem too.
2. I was on a thread where Quicken Mac had this same problem reported for a short time, but later it was fixed for them. So, it isn't really clear where the problem lies. One guess might be the intercession of the two. There are multiple fields for "cash" at least in the OFX format (and I think the FDX format is similar) as such there might be some kind of confusion of which of these should be used.

But one reason I think this has never been addressed directly by Quicken Inc is the moment that it might have been declared "a financial institution's problem", the subject gets dropped by Quicken support other than maybe sending something to Intuit to "work on it".