Brokerage Accounts matching Quicken Market Value

jcorley522

Now and then there are Quicken download errors in brokerage accounts such as dividends or interest do not download into the ledger or stock values on the brokerage website do not match Quicken or the worse offender placeholder notices pop up when Quicken does not recognize a buy or sale in the ledger. When this happens it is easier just to do the placeholder adjustment vs. spending 10-20 minutes fixing the problem. That is OK for an IRA account.

My suggestion is that when the investment account total does not agree with Quicken a dialogue box pops up and show the individual stocks and bonds that disagree with the downloaded values and offers suggestions to fix. So suggestions could be add a interest amount that did not come over in the update, accept the brokerage account value vs the value from the Quicken database and for those darn placeholder entries have the program review the ledger and suggest changes to the entry that may be a stock or bond sale. There is a big problem with bond premium and bond accrued interest.

Chris_QPW

I doubt this is possible. In a nutshell placeholders are the same as a balance adjustment after a reconcile in a banking account. Both are basically admitting that you can't reconcile and have given up.

Quicken can't "know" what was or wasn't supposed to be downloaded. All it knows is that it has X shares in Y securities and a cash amount in the register, and that the download from the financial institution states that these are different.

Just like a balance adjustment a placeholder can be used to "make the register match the information downloaded from the financial institution", but it is impossible to "fix the register transactions so that they are right". There are just too many possible reasons why what is in your Quicken register might be different than what was downloaded from the financial institution. One of which might be that the information given by the financial institution is actually wrong. I have seen on several financial institutions that the information on what shares there are, and the cash balance isn't always in sync. For instance, on at least one of financial institution I would see that the change in shares change right after the buy, but the cash used for it changes late at night.

In my opinion, the only proper way to deal with investment accounts is to reject all placeholders and to review every transaction to make sure that is correct. The information provided and such just isn't accurate enough to just trust importing of transactions without reviewing them.