Problems with setting up a manual investment account

Question

I am using Quicken for Mac subscription 9.0.3. I am trying to manual track an investment account that I have at a financial institution. First, I set up the total amount of money I had in the account. Next, I entered purchases of the various mutual funds and money market funds. But here is the problem: every time a fund goes up, then my overall balance column goes down - ie, so if I had $20k and I made $5k, now my overall balance says I have $15k - instead of $25k!!! So, how do I fix this ? Thank you!

ErnieMuse · Answer

Thanks for your assistance! I'll try to be brief: When I set up the investment account (June 2026) I had previously been keeping just a running balance of the total dollar value of the account. Then I added my investments as if they were subtracted from the total cash in the account. For example, if I had $10k as the balance, I then added 4 mutual funds worth $2k each, leaving a balance of $2k as cash. Then, when the value of the mutual funds went up, my balance of $2k now went down. But obviously that is the wrong way to do it!  So, rather than trying to go back and "fix" my account, I would rather delete the account (in Quicken) and start all over again. I will try to follow one of your scenarios (above) and see if that fixes things.

jacobs · Answer

But here is the problem: every time a fund goes up, then my overall balance column goes down

For clarity here, who you refer to your "overall balance", where are you looking to see this number? Are you on the Transactions tab, referring to the Balance column? Or are you on the Portfolio tab, referring to the Total of the Market Value column?

First, I set up the total amount of money I had in the account.

Again for clarity, do you mean the cash you had in the account, or the value of the account including any stock/bond/mutual fund/ETF holdings you already owned?

If you are starting from the beginning of this investment account, with only cash in it, that's fine. Then you should be using Buy transactions to match the real-world security purchases you made. Each Buy transaction will reduce the cash balance in the account, but the account value — as seen in the Portfolio tab — will remain the same; some of your cash has been used for securities of the same value (as of the date purchased).

On the other hand, if you are starting to track an investment account in Quicken which you have previously held, then you need to create the securities you hold without using up cash to purchase them; instead, you would use Add Shares transactions, in which you create the share holding of a security "out of thin air" without using cash. The complication here is that entering Add Shares transactions will ask you for the Cost and Number of Shares. Do you have your cost basis from your records, or from your brokerage's website?

For example, let's say you hold 100 shares of security ABC, which currently sells for 10/share, and therefore has a value of $1,000. To establish the proper cost basis for the holding, you'd ideally like to know when you bought it and for what price. Let's say you bought your 100 shares of ABC on 7/1/22 for $500, or $5 per share. You could then enter an Add Shares transaction with Date Acquired = 7/1/22, Cost = $500, and Shares = 100. If this is a publicly traded security, Quicken will download a price history up to the current value of $10/share today. On the Portfolio screen, set the graph time period to 5 years or longer, and you'll see your investment rising from $500 in 2022 to $1,000 today.

If that doesn't clarify something about what you've been entering so far, help fill in the blanks about your situation and what you have been entering, and we can then help further with why the value of your investment account is moving in the wrong direction.