Numerical Precision for Shares of Investments

Direct Connect doesn’t specify the precision.

This whole subject has many twists and turns.

The first is to understand is that there is no standard on what the financial institution has to use. On top of that I have seen cases where they use one precision on their website and use a different one (usually lower) to Quicken. The logs are the place to see what Quicken gets. Help → Contact Support → Log files. OFX for Direct Connect and Cloud Sync for Express Web Connect +.

Past that one has to realize that like most programs Quicken doesn’t store numbers like that internally. They are stored in a binary format and as such there are some decimal numbers that just can’t be stored precisely, so there is almost always some rounding used. There is also a limit to precision of that storage even in binary, I will skip over that because for this use case it should be enough. And then depending on where you are looking there might be rounding errors in calculations.

Note the selection for 8 digits is telling Quicken what to round to.

So, let’s start at the most obvious, if the financial institution isn’t sending the digits there is nothing Quicken can do.

As for rounding if you can manually correct the values clearly Quicken isn’t rounding at that point.

That would only leave rounding in the code that reads from what it downloaded to when it stores it into the register.

Going only by what I have read in the forum, the 8 digits support was put in a while back and immediately caused problems for some people. Because even without selecting this option some of the rounding in the program changed and they were left tiny fractional shares they had to clean up. But then that mostly passed and they were left people that requested the feature were mostly happy except for the lack of pricing and downloads for crypto currency in some cases. Then not too long ago people were reporting that the 8 digit precision wasn’t working properly. I don’t know the details on that complaint.

Take a look at ImportQIF.

I would be really interested in seeing what the share numbers are in the log files. That would certainly help pin down exactly where the problem is. With Direct Connect the logs are the exact conversation between Quicken and the financial institution's OFX server. Quicken sends a request for the transactions and the OFX server sends the result. Note the Web Connect/QFX file is basically this "result" part of the conversation. The Direct Connect conversation and the QFX file should agree on what is sent.

I haven't had a Vanguard account in several years, but I doubt Direct Connect has changed in all these years and I have some old QFX files.

Here is a "pretty formatted of one such transaction" (normally Vanguard QFX transactions have no line breaks or indenting). The UNITS are the number of shares, and in no case do I see them exceeding three digits after the decimal point. The share price on the other hand has much more digits but really doesn't count since it will quickly be replaced. I think Quicken just does its own math based on the total/fees and the number of shares.

Instead of having the "type" of an investment as "bond"; perhaps it should be a "mutual fund". That might help with your rounding issues. I am not certain how this would impact your past transactions, and I would suggest you try it on an investment that only has a few transactions to see how this would impact various reports and such.