2009 investments question

Jan 26, 2009 1 Replies
U

Just upgraded from 2006 (forced to that is, as some features were going away). I decided to take advantage of this and start downloading investment transactions instead of manually entering them. So I entered in all the info and downloaded one account as a test. It downloaded a years worth of transactions, which is good because it gave me a chance to compare them to manual ones already entered.



Note that with our bank, our downloaded bank account transactions always matched an existing transaction in the register. Has never been an issue.



This particular investment account is set up with a single mutual fund and no cash balance (each cash transaction went straight to a single mutual fund purchase so it made sense at the time). Now when I download the transactions, it says that none of the investment downloads matched any of the existing transactions, with a warning that the account cannot carry a cash balance. I have a choice of accepting them anyway, or using another account for the cash. I tried the latter (picking my checking account which was where the purchase funds came from), and it created a duplicate transaction in both the investment transaction and my checking account.



Is there a way to force it to match a previously entered transaction (we enter them early so we can budget for the expense)? I could download them and then delete the original transaction that the bank recorded, but that wipes out other info...



ideas?


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J

I don't use Single Mutual Fund accounts, so I can't say whether the fact that you are not getting a "match" is influenced by that account type. But I think it's possible.

What is the "Action" value of the existing transaction that should be matched? What is the "Action" value of the downloaded transaction that should match the existing register transaction? Is there a "BoughtX" in your Quicken register, while the downloaded transaction has a "Bought" Action value, for example?

It's possible that you'll need to change the way you handle the account if you want to benefit from downloads. Financial institutions don't know how individual Quicken users setup their Quicken investment accounts, so they often don't download the type of transaction a user would prefer.

I think you might have a better chance of using the downloaded transactions (at least in the future), if you changed your Quicken account to be able to hold cash, and multiple securities. You might have to change your approach too; such as transferring cash into the account in one transaction, then entering a separate Buy transaction, using cash in the account for the purchase.

If there is an "Edit" button alongside the transaction in the Accept window, you can try clicking that to see if Quicken offers you the chance to do a "manual match". In my experience, it's rare to get that opportunity in an investment account, but it can happen. And given your Quicken account type, I'm guessing not likely in your case.

Otherwise, I think you're out of luck.

If I had to choose, I'd delete the downloaded transactions.

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