Can I run a report of one investment in one account showing running totals?

I know of no report in Quicken that would report running share totals or running market value or running cash balance.

I think your only hope is to export to Excel and compute the totals in Excel, and I don't think it will necessarily be a trivial exercise.

To start, you can export a Quicken Investment Transaction report to Excel, and add an Excel column with a formula to compute the running share totals from the number-of-shares in each transaction. [This alone may be enough to solve many problems, and is the easiest part of the exercise.]

If the security is a mutual fund, you could use the price/share from the Investment Transaction report to have Excel compute the running market value.

If the security is a stock, the Quicken price/share for a transaction is not likely to be the closing price for that day, so you would probably need a separate source of closing quotes to import to Excel, then an Excel procedure to get the imported quotes assigned to the correct Excel rows for the date of the transaction.

You can export prices from Quicken to a tab delimited file which can be input to Excel. [To export: Investing > Security Detail View > (select security) > Update > Edit Price History > Print]

You can get a comma delimited file of all Quicken security prices (or the prices for a given security, plus several other options) using the free program QPH File Processor (Google for it).

I'm guessing someone with Excel expertise could get the tab delimited or comma delimited files into Excel and get the prices for each date assigned to the row that contained the transaction for that date. Then Excel could compute the market value for that date. [There's a newsgroup for Excel which I believe would have the expertise, if no one here does.]

The Investment Transaction report has the cash amount of each transaction, so its running total could also be computed in Excel. But it would be the cash amount related only to the single security whose transactions you exported.

No such report that I know of. But you may be able to use Portfolio (Investing -> Portfolio or Ctrl-U) to find when your share balance went wrong.

The following method (known as binary convergence) works quite well if you have brokerage statements that go back to the date or dates where the error(s) occurred.

Set Show:Holdings and Group by:Accounts and As of: to see your share balance, cost basis, etc. on that date. You can customize this report to add or remove columns.

Then find a date G where the balance was good, a date B where it is bad and a date M about midway between G and B.

If the balance on M is bad the error is between G and M, so divide that interval in half and repeat the process. If the balance on M is good divide the interval between M and B. Keep dividing until you find the date where the error occurred.

I forgot to mention that if you have Group by:Accounts in Portfolio you can click the "+" to the left of the security name to see the lots of the security that you held on the As of: date. This may provide a further clue as to what's wrong.

Jerry

Thanks, John, for this idea. This way of looking at data, using running totals, etc., is so fundamental to my thinking about investments, checking and savings, that I would probably want to generate a separate report for each type of holding in each account. The amount of work it would take is prohibitive. Not having the ability to get this in Quicken is a major shortcoming of the product. When you go to, for example, the Vanguard site, you always see transaction reports with running totals in shares owned. Same thing for other investment sites and for bank sites.

I seem to remember that certain kinds of accounts in Quicken show running totals in the register, and I'll look for them. If there's a way I can re-design my entire portfolio to give accounts to look like this, I will do it.

I - and I believe others - have suggested to Intuit that they modify the Investment transaction report to optionally allow the display of running share totals. You could add your voice to the list by going to the Intuit Support web site and making a "suggestion".

You include all desired investment accounts in the Investment Transaction report, sub-total it by account, and export/import that to Excel.

Getting the running share balance in Excel would not be that much work.

Your original question only asked about investment accounts, I figured you already knew that non-investment account "registers" displayed a running balance. And that you can print a "check register" report for non-investment accounts which shows a running balance.

Also, I mis-spoke in my previous post: you can also print a "register" report for an investment account which shows a running cash balance ... but there is no option to control the contents except for a date range.

The only investment accounts that I know that provide a running share balance are Quicken Single Mutual Fund accounts ... and I personally suggest not using Single Mutual Fund accounts, they are two restrictive (and you won't be able to use them if you download and your fi doesn't allow each security to be downloaded to a separate Quicken account).

I have also submitted the suggestion.