Corrected transactions not downloaded correctly

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andyc3
andyc3 Member ✭✭✭
in Investing (Windows)
My brokerage account has some corrected brokerage buy-side transactions. In those transactions, the "corrected" transaction in my brokerage account has the same quantity/share price/etc. as the original, is still listed as "Bought/Buy" transaction, but the net amount in the register is a positive number (as if a sale). "buy" transaction. Unfortunately, QW downloads the dollar amount as if the transaction were a second buy transaction, which it is not. Can you add a transaction type pair named "Corrected Sale" and "Corrected Buy" that would correctly identify this type of transaction, e. g., a buy transaction with a positive net amount. As things stand now, I must either delete both transactions (loss of information) or change the second "buy corrected" transaction to a sell (incorrect action) transaction to reconcile holdings. Or perhaps there is another way not to mischaracterize the corrections.

Answers

  • splasher
    splasher SuperUser ✭✭✭✭✭
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    You need to complain to the brokerage that they are sending the information wrong.  Quicken isn't creating the content, just reacting to what is being sent to it.
    When my brokerage, corrects a previous day's transactions, they come in sell/buy pairs.
    Asking Quicken to create some new transaction type is not a guarantee that the financial institution will use it any more correctly than the existing transactions.

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  • andyc3
    andyc3 Member ✭✭✭
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    I will be speaking with my brokerage firm advisory this week. But the situation is more complex than you represent. There is no doubt that the brokerage set of history/activity transactions is the data authority; the QW data set is not the authority. What QW is doing is silently altering an authority record by changing the sign of the "buy" transaction cash. The brokerage firm might want/need to represent the corrected transaction as a "buy" with positive cash (as if it were a sale) since this preserves the trade intent of the original transaction. If the firm represented the correction explicitly as a "sale" then it would show naturally positive cash but lose the record of the intended transaction type. Since there are strict capital loss harvesting rules, writing a corrected "buy" transaction as a "sale" might have unintended and incorrect adverse consequences for the investor. QW can solve this correct transaction problem by any of the following: It can remove the controls that force "buy" transactions to have negative cash so one can create a postive cash "buy" transactin manually; it can import authority transactions without making assumptions about their validity (best solution) although this implies accepting positive cash for "buy" transactions, or it can create a new trade type pair "corrected buy" and its "corrected sell" that explicitly allows positive cash for corrected buys and negative cash for corrected sells. What QW should not be doing is adjusting authority transactions.
  • Jim_Harman
    Jim_Harman SuperUser ✭✭✭✭✭
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    I think your best bet here would be to make the corrections in Quicken as you describe above - delete the original Buy and replace it with the corrected version, or reverse the original buy with a Sell of the same tax lot at the same price on the same date followed by the corrected Buy. You should end up with the correct number of shares, cash used, tax lots, and cost basis.

    Trying to get Quicken to implement a new transaction type for this rather rare situation is probably a losing proposition.

    If you want to pursue this further and see exactly what is being downloaded from your FI, you can go to Help > Log files and review the OFX Log, which is XML-like and sort of human readable.

    You can save this log to a text file and open it with Notepad or another text editor. Once there, you can search the file for the transaction amount or something else unique about the transactions. This will tell for sure whether the downloaded amounts were positive or negative for example, and will help to indicate whether any problems are with the downloaded data or with Quicken's interpretation of it.
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