Help needed in setting up an IRA acct -

Boy, without knowing any of the details behind the question "how do I set up an IRA Account" it's difficult to know where to start and what level of detail is needed.

At its simplest, you can create the Account as a manual Account, tell Quicken what securities and the number of shares or each are in the Account as of "today", enter a gross cost basis for all the shares (assuming you know that), enter any cash in the Account as of "today", and your Account is established with valid data. It won't have "lot" information, it won't have "holding period" information, but it's a perfectly good starting point.

If you wanted to have downloading work with this Account after that you could connect the Account to the associated Financial Institution, delete all the "history" information that comes with the initial download (90 days worth of transactions is common), and move forward from there.

At the other end of the scale from simplest to "most comprehensive" you'd create the manual Account "as of" the day you opened it and start entering transactions in the Account from Day 1 to "today." Presumably this Account has interacted with your checking Accounts during those 100 years, so that would mean finding all those interactions in the checking Accounts and editing them to reflect that fact that the IRA existed. You'd enter all the Buys, the Sells, the Dividends the RtrnCaps, the Corporate Actions (splits, spin offs, split offs, mergers, name changes, etc.) to build a comprehensive history of the Account. Then you could connect the Account to its Financial Institution, accept all the transactions (all shown as "Match" because you've done a perfect job), and you're done.

And of course there's intermediate points on the scale from simplest to most comprehensive (e.g, starting at the beginning of a year of the Account's existence) you could make your entry point.

You appear to understand the accounting for checking accounts and credit card accounts - balanced entries of debits and credits, money flowing in and out - and investment account accounting works exactly the same, except for the fact that transactions within them frequently are more complex, requiring some higher level of understanding in order to get the accounting properly stated.

So what's the problem?

If you are planning to later switch to online services, why not just start out with setting up your Fidelity account for download right from the start? From my perspective, setting up an offline manual account first when the long-term intent is to be able to download from Fidelity will create a lot of additional work that really is not necessary.

When you set up Fidelity for online services it will will download information that Quicken will need to add the account for you….including the detailed transactions data for brokered CDs and other securities that you have bought and sold (for as far back as the last 2 yrs). The process is so much easier than doing it all manually and so much more accurate. I've been downloading my Fidelity accounts into Quicken since 2010 and for the most part it has been a problem-free and pleasant experience.

If you want to do this, just go to:

1. Edit > Preferences > Investments > make sure the box for Default to Simple Investing for new accounts is not checked.
2. Tools > Add Account > type in Fidelity Investements > Next > follow the prompts using your current login information for your online Fidelity.com acount. Quicken will likely prompt you what to do with the data that gets downloaded….be sure to select (if given the option) Add to Quicken. During the process of adding the account, Quicken will do most of the legwork for you and will usually ask you questions along the way that will help to get everything set up properly.

Once completed, take a look at the new account in Quicken (account details, account register transactions, etc.) and let us know what questions you might have and we can hopefully help to answer them. There will be also need to be a couple of configuration tweaks that will need to be done, we'll need to have a discussion about how Fidelity reports Core Account Cash to Quicken and perhaps have a discussion regarding Placeholders that Quicken might enter into the register during this setup process.

That link provided above by @QuickUserPSP has a lot of really good information that will help you set up the account properly. I encourage you to review and follow it.