Price History has additional entries

I believe there is an inherent problem with the way Quicken records price history.  Apparently for any individual security, there is only one price history regardless if it is held in multiple investment accounts.  I balance a single account, calculating the share price sometimes to the six decimals to make the security holding total match my statement (Quicken's own recommendation, by the way.)  When finished, this account holding and value exactly matches my statement. 

Then I balance a second investment account that has the same security holding and again calculate the share price to the six decimals to make this security holding and value exactly match the statement. 

Then when I go back to the first account, it no longer matches its statement but is off a few cents. Quicken must be either maintaining one price per date, and using it for all accounts, or is maintaining multiple prices per date and then using one entered in another account.

This becomes fairly obvious because after balancing the first account, then going to the holdings for the second account, any matching securities between accounts already have the same ending price, but due to the price history problem, the security total may not match.  But if you fix price in the second account, then return to the holding in the first account, it probably no longer matches your statement.

This is a design flaw that can only be fixed by maintaining a separate price history per account/security.  A very bad work-around would be to change the security name in one account so that it doesn't match the other, but this destroys any ability to analyze the performance of a single security across accounts.

On further thought, price history may also be coming from reinvestment transactions which will have a price for the day the reinvestment is cleared.  Since reinvestment transactions will be dated when they occur, any price history from that transaction will be later than your last month-end pricing and this affect the value for all holdings.

Whenever doing reports on investment accounts, always be sure also to use a specific ending date instead of taking the default value of today.  This will help some also.

Now another thought.  At one point I had the same security in an individual account AND in a company profit-sharing account.  However, the company account used what they called UNIT prices, which were not the same their own market shares, so I was forced to use different security names to keep the price/share and price/unit separated. 

Moral:  Don't always assume because it's wrong that you did it. 

Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure this is never going to be fixed because it involves rethinking the whole price history design.  But as President Reagan said, IT CAN BE DONE.