nav[aria-label="Primary Navigation"] { padding: 0; & ul { list-style: none; width: 100%; display: flex; flex-direction: row; justify-content: start; align-items: start; gap: 30px; padding: 0; & li { margin: 0; } & ul li { list-style: none; } } }

How to enter Vanguard share balance rounding after ETF sale?

sd_mark

I'm on Quicken Classic Premier R66.23.

I sold some shares in two Vanguard ETFs. The Vanguard transaction reports show shares sold to four decimals, and those numbers downloaded correctly to Quicken.

However it seems that after recording the sale, Vanguard then rounded the online share balance to three decimals (this time in my favor), as I can see in the Vanguard Holdings screen. So now Quicken is telling me that there is a Securities Comparison Mismatch of 0.0005 and 0.0002 shares. It's offering to create a placeholder transaction for those shares. From the Help, it looks like if I do that, it will ask me about the cost basis.

Am I correct that Vanguard is rounding these share balances to three decimals?
What should I do in Quicken?

I realize these are tiny amounts but it seems I need a procedure to handle Vanguard rounding in Quicken.

Find more posts tagged with

Reconcile

Accepted answers

sd_mark

Thanks for the replies.

I like the automated downloads and I like the ability to sell fractional shares based on value.

I think I'll do this:

From gear icon > Reconcile Shares, let Quicken create the placeholder transactions.
Edit the placeholder. Enter History. Enter Missing Transactions. Create a "Buy - Shares Bought" for the rounding amount, e.g. 0.0002 shares. Price paid and Total cost $0 (it's a free gift from Vanguard!).
The placeholder now shows 0 shares. Delete it.

Now Quicken's balance matches Vanguard's. Basically it's just a manual entry reflecting Vanguard's rounding behavior. If I'm on the "losing" end of a rounding error, I guess it would be a "Sell - Shares Sold" transaction instead, but also at $0 price and cost.

All comments

Frankx

Hi @sd_mark

I just took a look at a Vanguard account. I actually scanned six hundred transactions and noted that, while there were transactions that displayed four decimal places, the fourth decimal place was always a zero.

Have you always downloaded transactions, or is it possible that you made some manual transactions that had four decimals where the 4th one was NOT a zero?

Get back to me with some additional information and we'll go from there.

Frankx

sd_mark

@Frankx are you looking at ETFs/stocks? They may handle mutual funds differently.

On most of these, I used Vanguard's option to Sell at market rate based on dollar value, meaning it's calculating fractional shares to sell. Here is a screen shot from one transaction report:

Frankx

Hi again @sd_mark

I have Vanguard investments in stocks and mutual funds. None of my accounts are showing transactions that have prices where the fourth decimal is other than zero. I see, in the example you have displayed above, the transaction is based on amount of the dollar value you seek. And in the example - the number of shares is displayed to the fourth decimal.

Have you tried to allow Quicken to use a placeholder? It seems that may be your only option for the current transaction. However, in the future it might be better to change the dollar amount you are seeking, to align with a sale of the number of shares that will only have three decimals.

Frankx

fun1000000

@sd_mark

I’ve been using Vanguard for many years, I don’t download, I enter everything manually. I enter quantity, price, and total cost from my Vanguard’s confirmations. Every once in a great while, when I look at my monthly statements, there is a discrepancy of a few cents due to the rounding. All I do is make an adjustment entry for the difference to get it to equal.

I wouldn’t worry about the cost basis, seeing that it is so minimal.

Here is an example: I just updated my daily quotes. I have Vanguard Total Bond Market ETF -BND.

Quicken shows $73.76 Price quote,67.903 shares, MV $5,008.53

On my Vanguard online account, it shows $73.76price,67.903 shares, but it shows Current Balance of $5.008.51

Now if I look at my last statement ending 2-28, it shows share amount of 67.6958 before dividend, and If I go back to that date on Quicken it shows

67.696 shares, making the different balance do to the rounding of shares.

UKR

Whatever you're doing when manually entering investment transactions, make sure that

number of shares and
total amount

always exactly match the actual trade transaction.
Let Quicken calculate the price per share to as many decimal places as it wants to, even if that does not quite match the rounded values shown at the brokerage.
This way you avoid account balance mismatches and there will be no need for balance adjustment transactions.

sd_mark

Thanks for the replies.

I like the automated downloads and I like the ability to sell fractional shares based on value.

I think I'll do this:

From gear icon > Reconcile Shares, let Quicken create the placeholder transactions.
Edit the placeholder. Enter History. Enter Missing Transactions. Create a "Buy - Shares Bought" for the rounding amount, e.g. 0.0002 shares. Price paid and Total cost $0 (it's a free gift from Vanguard!).
The placeholder now shows 0 shares. Delete it.

NotACPA

@fun1000000 I don't hold investments at Vanguard, but i do at Fidelity and it wouldn't surprise me if this factoid about Fidelity is also true at Vanguard.

When fractional shares, and/or fractional quotes, are involved, the multiplier of the 2 often results in a dollar amount that's a fraction of a penny.

Fidelity uses truncation to determine the total transaction amount, while Q uses 5/4 rounding. So it's not at all unusual for a transaction to be off by a penny. And with multiple funds in the account, the account might even be off by a nickel or so.

I tend to just ignore such minuscule amounts as they're only going to continue to sporadically occur.

sd_mark

To be clear, the discrepancy I was trying to reconcile is in share balance, not dollar value. Quicken accurately downloaded and summed the share balance to four decimals; Vanguard transacted four decimals then rounded the balance to three.

Jim_Harman

@sd_mark Another way to eliminate the share balance discrepancy due to rounding is to note the security and the amount of the mismatch and exit the Security Comparison Mismatch without creating a Placeholder. Then edit the number of shares in the downloaded Sold transaction so as to eliminate the mismatch. This will be a small fraction of a share.

You can check your work by clicking on the gear at the top right of the transaction list and selecting Reconcile Shares. This will compare the downloaded share balances to the balance in Quicken and should present a dialog that says they agree.

sd_mark

Thanks @Jim_Harman. I can see how that would work, but I like having the transaction that exactly matches the Vanguard transaction statement. But the net effect of your approach and mine would seem to be the same: adjust the share balance without changing the dollar value.

Jim_Harman

If you really want to enter an additional transaction, Added or Removed would be better. That adjusts the share balance without affecting the cash balance. To prevent messing up the share price and cost basis, when Adding, use the date and share price of the last transaction for that security.

sd_mark

I'll have to look at Added/Removed. "Buy - Shares Bought" is what was suggested when resolving the placeholder. It seemed to work to just use $0 for price and total cost.

Jim_Harman

It's up to you what you enter, but adjusting with a Buy with a cost of zero will create a small tax lot with zero cost basis and may mess up Quicken's price history.

sd_mark

Thanks @Jim_Harman. Finally getting back to this. I changed the "Bought" to an "Added".

That asks for an Acquired On date, which I just set to the Transaction Date (date of the original sale).

I'm confused by the Total Cost. It didn't cost me anything, but I can't enter $0. However it does not change the Cash Balance for the account, which remains $0.

Interesting that after downloading month-end transactions from Vanguard, I now have three more securities that are reporting a "Securities Comparison Mismatch" of 0.001, 0.0004, and 0.0005 shares.

I'm beginning to wonder if I just need to expect Quicken to be "off" a bit and ignore these messages?

q_lurker

I’ll suggest you may need to be more deterministic as to what Vanguard is actually doing. I’ve had a small number of ETFs through Vanguard and always found transactions and holdings reported to 3-decimal precision.

So, one — is Vanguard really tracking to 4-decimals? My experience would say know in which case I’d suggest you correct the transactions back to 3-decimal levels. That’s really not changing your costs, only slightly your transaction price per share.

My second question in the same vein would be toward accumulation effects. If one month’s transaction was x.xx06 shares rounded up to x.xx1 and the next was the same x.xx06 rounded up to x.xx1, do they show you with the x.xx2 total, or is it x.xx12 rounded to x.xx1.

Thirdly, I might be inclined to make my own decision to maintain Quicken data to 3 or 4 decimal precision. If that led to a last-digit issue at some point, I might ‘cheat’ the next transaction to compensate for the discrepancy. In the meantime, I’d knowingly ignore the Quicken comparisons.

sd_mark

I called Vanguard. The rep confirmed that transaction shares are reported to four decimals but balances are stored to three decimals, also in their internal systems. It sounded like no one had ever asked him this before, though he agreed that the inconsistency wasn't good. He's going to raise the issue with management and I.T. so I'm sure they'll hop right on it, haha.

More notes:

Reinvestments of both mutual funds and ETFs show quantity to four decimals, but the thousandth digit is always 0, so they are "pre-rounding" those trades to three decimals.
I do an automatic monthly IRA withdrawal from a mutual fund based on a fixed dollar amount. Again, transactions show four decimals but the last digit is always 0.
When selling mutual funds by Share, it is possible to sell fractional shares, but the web UI limits you to three decimals.
When selling ETFs by Share, it is not possible to sell fractional shares; only whole shares can be sold.

So it's only when issuing one-off sell-by-dollar transactions (at least of ETFs) that the share quantities are reported to four decimals.

@q_lurker, you raise an interesting possibility: standardize on a 3-decimal balance since that's all Vanguard keeps track of. After downloading a 4-decimal transaction, if it throws off the 3-decimal balance, just override the downloaded transaction to 3 decimals. Unfortunately, when I tested that on one trade, it changed the dollar value of transaction by $0.05, so then my cash account would be off from the Vanguard balance.

q_lurker

Don’t let it change dollars; let it change price per share, which is of no real significance.

sd_mark

This is interesting. Yesterday, I made another dollar-based transaction. The Vanguard transaction report shows shares transacted to four decimals and the price to two decimals:

But what got downloaded to Quicken this time was shares rounded to three decimals and the price to six:

The 3-decimal shares in the transaction should keep the Quicken share balance in line with the 3-decimal Vanguard share balance.

Basically this looks like what @q_lurker recommended: adjust the price in the original transaction so that the shares round to three decimals. But now maybe Vanguard is doing that for me.

sd_mark

Sigh. All of this has been based on Vanguard reporting transactions to four decimals, then rounding balances to three decimals, which is all you can see online.

I just realized that Vanguard's monthly reports actually show share balances to four decimals. For example, I have one holding showing xx.3415 shares on my March 31 monthly report but xx.342 when I check online.

Is there some way to see see the raw files that Quicken receives from Vanguard? I'd like to see whether Vanguard is transmitting 3-decimal or 4-decimal balances and transactions.