Security Comparison Mismatch due to rounding?

Question

Hi, I'm looking for some advice on how best to handle this. I have been getting the Security Comparison Mismatch popup regarding a number of my investments. Everything I've found basically says identify the missing transactions and get the history into Quicken to resolve it, but in my case, I'm not missing any transactions, everything is there.

The differences are all small fractions of a share, +/- 0.001 shares, 0.005 shares, 0.01 shares, 0.02 shares - small numbers like these. My best guess as to where this is coming from is a rounding error during download from E*TRADE. It seems that E*TRADE's record has more precision than the download is bringing in (and unfortunately, their reporting on the website seems to have even less precision so it's very hard to reconcile).

What's my best plan of attack for reconciling these shares? I tried adding placeholder transactions but that seemed to break some calculations since I don't have the specific cost info for those placeholder shares - I'd hate to kill my reporting over what appears to be a rounding error. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated!

NotACPA · Answer

Recently, I've been editing the downloaded quotes, on transactions, to show only 3 decimal places and using the Commission field to adjust for the odd penny difference.

Particularly for the club account (I'm the Treasurer) that seems to make the Capital Gain/Loss numbers a little cleaner and thus annual reporting to the National organization a bit easier.

Jim_Harman · Answer

When I had an account with T Rowe Price, there would often be rounding errors in the share quantities after downloading reinvested dividends.

My solution was to make a corresponding adjustment in the number of shares in the reinvestment, keeping the total cost the same and letting Quicken recompute the price per share.

q_lurker · Answer

Firstly, I don’t use E*Trade so I don’t face the issues you are seeing.  I download from two FIs and manually enter transactions for another.  My comments are thus more generalized.

I make a concerted effort to maintain all holdings to a 3-decimal accuracy (0.001 shares). Where I end up having to make adjustments are most commonly from stock spin-offs or stock splits. That precision is consistent with my mutual fund provider.

The corollary to that is to also have transactions specify shares and total cost; never specify price per share having Quicken compute number of shares.

If E*trade is being inconsistent, I am not sure how to get around that specifically but I would make the effort to try.  So my inherent message is to not be afraid to tweak the download from the brokerage, or stated another way, don’t trust the brokerage to do things the way you need them done.

Hope this helps.