Quicken Classic for Windows - Older Unassigned stock transaction

Rich Gaughan
Rich Gaughan Member ✭✭✭
edited January 14 in Investing (Windows)

I have Quicken Classic for Windows R65.29 and I have a question about an Unassigned stock transaction.  I download my Schwab/ThinkorSwim  transactions every week in Quicken.   As I have at least 10 stock transactions I manually assign the SELLs to the appropriate BUYs using the “specify lot” function.   It works fine.   I recently noticed that I had an Unassigned transaction from August 12th (five months ago).  I found it when I ran an Investment report, it shows up as a huge loss, which is incorrect.  I assume that because this transaction is an unassigned SELL the tool does not know the correct gain/loss.

If I go ahead and assign that Four month old SELL transaction to a BUY,  it messes up the SPECIFY LOT totals from August 12th forward to today.   Is there a way to assign that SELL transaction without messing up the other transactions?  

Can I edit that invalid entry in the Investment report? 

FYI I tried running “Rebuild Investment Lots”, that did not fix the problem. 

Comments

  • q_lurker
    q_lurker Quicken Windows Subscription SuperUser ✭✭✭✭✭

    As I see it, Specify Lots is for determining capital gains. I would not normally expect to see or evaluate capital gains through am Investment Transactions report, although the Realized Gains lines that show up could be helpful in that regard. Are you terming the "unassigned" status to the lack of a Realized Gain line in that report for that sale?

    What does a Capital Gains report show for that sale? That should identify the basis and acquisition date of the shares being sold either based on your "Specify Lots' specification or Quicken's default FIFO. If you do not specify lots, Quicken should be defaulting to that first-in, first-out. That is not (should not be) the same as treating the sold shares as having $0 basis. I suppose an explanation for that might be if you at some point used an Add Shares transaction but did not establish the cost basis of those added shares.

    On rare occasions, I've had Quicken lose track of lot specification information. What I recall doing in such a case is editing any later Sell transactions to NOT specify the lot sold. That would free up the lots I needed to sell for the problematic transaction. I could then work forward from that problematic transaction specifying the proper lots for each sale.

    I am not positive that lines up with your situation, but may give you something to chew on as a possibility.

  • Rich Gaughan
    Rich Gaughan Member ✭✭✭

    Thanks for the response.  FYI, I use the Quicken Investment Transaction report for a summary of equity transactions profit and losses. To reiterate for the Quicken readership, I found an unassigned transaction from August 12th 2025.  When I looked at the “Specify Lots” function for this SELL transaction  it was not assigned to a BUY transaction.  When I ran the Investment Transaction report it used a recent equity price for the equity that was way higher than the 8/12/25 price.  So the report showed a five digit loss for that transaction, instead of a four digit gain.  

    As a workaround I downloaded the Investment Transaction report into an excel spreadsheet, thereby allowing me to easily edit that transaction.  I was looking for an elegant Quicken solution, the excel solution is clunky but it works fine.  

    Note to Self:  Ensuring that every SELL transaction has a corresponding BUY transaction avoids a lot of issues. 

    Thanks Q-lurker for all your thoughtful responses.   

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