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Importing investing account data

Earl59

Hi, I have 5 investing accounts (IRAs, Roth IRAs, and taxed) across Schwab and Interactive Brokers. I've connected the accounts, but every transaction (100s, possibly a 1000+) has a placeholder and must be fixed. I signed up for Quicken Classic Premier two days ago so that I can track both spending and my investments. I have spent hours trying to "fix" the placeholders, and I've hardly made a dent. The account values are therefore wrong.

Is this common? And will this happen every time Quicken syncs with my accounts?

I have an Empower 401k account offered by my company it doesn't have a problem connecting to these accounts.

I really wanted a desktop program that could track all my finances, but I'm having a hard time with Quicken. Someone please explain what could possibly be the issue. Is it something I might be doing?

Thanks!

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Accepted answers

mshiggins

@Earl59 it is common for an initial investment transaction download to create placeholder transactions for currently held lots of your securities. Going forward, new transactions will download with complete cost info.

It is likely to take some effort to get the placeholders resolved. My approach would be to start with the account with the fewest placeholders, resolve those placeholders, then move on to the next account.

There are also alternate ways to import transactions, but they all have a bit of a learning curve. If you’re up for the challenge, let us know and we can provide more info.

Lastly, let me tell you having all your financial data at your fingertips is amazingly powerful. Well worth the initial set up effort.

Chris_QPW

Just so you know what it is going on. When Quicken does the initial download the financial institution doesn't send the full history of your account, usually more like 90 days or in some cases it might even be a year or two, but it will be limited. Along with the downloading of the transactions the financial institution sends a summary of the number of shares in each security and your cash balance. As such, Quicken knows at a certain point that you have X number of shares for a given security, but has no transaction/idea of how you acquired them.

That is what I placeholder is, it is Quicken's "balance adjustment for a securities shares".

In the future downloads hopefully the number of shares for a given security in Quicken will line up with the "summary information" that the financial institution sends with the downloaded transactions (that affect the amount of shares and cost basis) that Quicken has and as such no placeholders should be created.

All comments

NotACPA

I wouldn't think that you should have more than 1 placeholder per security … so do you hold 1000+ securities?

And, how far back a download, into any Q account, investing or not, goes is determined by the FI … not by Q. 90 days is pretty typical.

How did the security holdings FIRST get input to Q? Via download? Or did you use the "Add Security" option to initially create the positions?

Placeholders are created when the downloaded position quantity disagrees with the position quantity already in Q. So, you might want to review how you initially created those positions.

Earl59

Thank you for your response.

I have 100+ securities total over all the accounts.

Some have stock splits or reverse splits, leaving the correct number of shares wrong. And it then creates an issue of dividends (monthly, quarterly, and yearly) not being properly calculated.

When I added the accounts (as new, no pre-existing securities) to Quicken via DirectConnect it automatically imported all my securities but did not have a cost basis for the security or those that reinvested the dividends into new shares, creating a placeholder for each security and dividend reinvestment. Some were assigned arbitrary dates from June 2026, some dates from May 2025. These are mostly securities I've held long term (2+ years) so you might imagine the number of dividend reinvestments.

I've attached a small snippet of what I see in one of the accounts.

Thanks

mshiggins

There are also alternate ways to import transactions, but they all have a bit of a learning curve. If you’re up for the challenge, let us know and we can provide more info.

Lastly, let me tell you having all your financial data at your fingertips is amazingly powerful. Well worth the initial set up effort.

Chris_QPW

That is what I placeholder is, it is Quicken's "balance adjustment for a securities shares".

Earl59

Thanks all for the responses, I appreciate it. I will plod along to resolve the placeholders as best I can. I hope in the long run it is worth the effort 🤞.