Complete Positions to Simple, What now

Philip107

I changed my retirement 401K accounts from Complete Positions to Simple as I was tired of all the needless transaction record keeping.

I'm curious what happens to all the previous transactions Quicken has recorded, and can they be deleted from the account since they are no longer needed and just taking up space.

You can't see the transactions from an Account register, but they do show up in Investment Transaction Reports. I wondered about closing the accounts and starting over, but I guess they can't be deleted as there are transactions from and to other Quicken accounts.

Quicken Laura

Hi @Philip107,

Thank you for reaching out. That’s a great question.

Yes, you can delete historical information and adjust your balances manually, but this can be time-consuming. Another option is to close the accounts and add them as new. Quicken will download only a certain number of transactions, depending on what the financial institution provides.

Once the new accounts show the correct balances, you can hide or delete the old accounts within the same data file. Alternatively, you can create a new data file and start fresh, adding all the accounts you need while keeping the old file as a reference for historical information.

I recommend saving a backup before making any changes.

Please let me know if you’d like guidance with any of these options—I can walk you through the steps.

Philip107

I created an Investment Transaction report and set the type for cash and anything similar, like withdraw or deposit for the 401K accounts. I can see many transfers into and out of checking and saving accounts. I believe if I delete the 401K account then these transfers will be shown as from or to [unspecified account]. After creating the new Simple Position 401K account, I could then change the [unspecified account] transfers to the correct new 401K account name. Is that a sound procedure?

Going forward I will only have withdrawals from these 401K accounts to satisfy RMDs. I've had one already since being on Simple and I see where Quicken automatically added a Cash, Balance Adjustment back to the 401K account to counteract the cash out and set the cash balance to zero. You can only see this in a Report as there is no Register for Simple Position accounts, there should be.

Quicken Laura

Hi @Philip107,

You are partially correct. In most cases, when you delete a transaction that is recorded as a transfer in the account, the transaction is removed from both accounts involved in the transfer.

However, if one of the accounts involved in the transfer is deleted, the category in the remaining account will change to [Unspecified Account].

Before deleting multiple transactions, I recommend testing this behavior with a single transaction first. If you still plan to delete them, it may be helpful to update the category to the appropriate one before deleting the transaction to avoid any confusion later.

Philip107

On a copy of my data file, I deleted a 401K account and the remaining transfer transactions in my checking account did change to [unspecified account]. However, I created a new 401K account as Simple Positions and connected it to Fidelity. Quicken ended up downloading and saving a full year's worth of transactions. You don't see them because there's no account Register but if you create an investment transaction report they all show up.

I thought that when set to Simple Positions Quicken wouldn't download all the transactions, but it does anyway and keeps them in the background. So, it doesn't really matter between simple and complete, Quicken always downloads whatever the institution provides.

Chris_QPW

I might have some insight on that. I don't think there is an actual way that quick can request only the summary information. So every time both the transaction and balances are downloaded. So on the very first download that's always been whatever the financial institution decides to send as far as how far back usually 90 days but could be different. I think that's what you're seeing. After that initial download though Quicken still gets all that data but what it does in simple mode as put in adjustments and that's what you should see going forward.

So could go in there in complete mode delete the transactions. And then go back to simple mode do a download and you should see it just put in adjustments.

Maybe Quicken and should have been better at handling the initial download, but I guess that's what it is. I have my wife's 401k set up in simple mode and it just gets adjustments but I didn't recreate it from start.