Inaccurate investment account

Here is some background on Placeholders and how to resolve them:

To make Placeholders visible, go to Edit > Preferences > Investments and make sure the “Show hidden transactions” box is checked. 

Placeholders will have a gray background in the account’s transaction list (register) even if they are not selected, and will have “Entry” in the Action column.

Placeholders compensate for missing, duplicate, or incorrect investing transactions by forcing Quicken’s share balance for a security to match a specified value on the date of the Placeholder. This is usually the share count downloaded from your financial institution (FI).

Because transactions are missing or incorrect, Quicken will not be able to compute the cost basis or performance for the affected securities. You will see asterisks in the Portfolio views for this data.

Often Placeholders are due to rounding errors in the downloaded data, so for example you will see a Placeholder that adjusts the share balance by .0013 share following a dividend reinvestment. In this case you can adjust the number of shares in the Reinvest transaction so that the Placeholder is zero, then delete the Placeholder.

Placeholders also prevent new transactions like Div, Bought and Sold prior to the security’s Placeholder date from affecting the account’s cash balance. This shows up as N/A in the Cash Amt column of the transaction list. Quicken does this by creating a linked Cash Balance Adjustment just before the affected transaction. Deleting one of the transactions will delete them both.  

To allow the cash balance to change when entering missing transactions that affect the cash balance, you must first delete all the Placeholders in the account for this security that have later dates than the transaction you are entering. Because of this, if you are entering a series of missing transactions it will be easiest to work in reverse chronological order.

Always back up your data file before changing historical transactions.

For more information on resolving placeholders, please see this FAQ: