------------------------------------- Recently, I have not been able to change the reconcile status of any trnasaction in an investment account. The column that usually has a dropdown list for "c" or "R" just shows a "..." when I try to change it. Help please?
Tax and Accounting Software ForumsWeb and RSS access to your favorite newsgroup - alt.comp.software.financial.quicken - 19820 messages and counting! ##-----------------------------------------------##
Tax and Accounting Software ForumsWeb and RSS access to your favorite newsgroup - alt.comp.software.financial.quicken - 19828 messages and counting! ##-----------------------------------------------##
Please don't make us drag the information out of you one cryptic sentence at a time!
Tell us first, what you are trying to do. Then tell us, step by step, what you did and what results you saw. If there are any error messages, please post them VERBATIM. From what little you've told us so far, it does not seem to be an issue with your data or with the program, but only with your method of trying to reconcile...something.
Remember the obvious: We cannot see your computer, and we can't read your mind.
And it would help if you set your newsreader to quote the prior context so that we don't have to flip back and forth. I have no idea what "rockryno.com" is, but it is NOT making it easier for us to help you. :>(
When you right click on the account name and select Edit, what type of account is specified? None of my Investment accounts have a register or can be reconciles. Only Bank and savings accounts can be reconciled.
Each of my stockbroker accounts can be reconciled, and I reconcile each of them monthly. I've even added the Reconcile button to my Quicken Toolbar, since Quicken does not provide that button for an Investment Account.
Until about a year ago, I made all entries in this account manually from my keyboard, based on trade confirmations, dividend and interest notices, CMA checks I wrote and deposits I made, and any other cash transactions that I knew about, plus any new ones that showed up on the monthly statement. For about a year now, I've been having Quicken download transactions daily, so the reconciliation procedure may now seem redundant, but I haven't yet stopped doing it.
To reconcile my Merrill Lynch account, for example, I click on ML in the Accounts List to get to the ML Register. Then I click that Reconcile button. (Without that button, I'd need to click Tools | Reconcile an Account, as I told helpern earlier.) This pops up a small "Statement Summary" window with lines for Starting Cash Balance, Ending Cash Balance, and Statement Ending Date. The starting figure and today's date are already filled in, so I enter the ending cash balance from the paper statement and the date of that statement, then click OK. This presents the typical Reconciliation screen, showing all the cash transactions entered in the ML account for this month. Nowadays, all entries are already shown as Reconciled, since they've been downloaded, but I make sure to match any that are not already matched. When the "Difference" in the lower right corner shows "0.00", I click Finish; by then, all the entries in the Register show "R" in the first column.
You've probably seen my frequent rants about Quicken's inept handling of Certificates of Deposit. My method, for several years, has been to put them all into a single Investment Account called "CDs". Because of the difficulty in getting Quicken to schedule interest income transactions, whether compounded or received in cash, I've generally resorted to manually recording interest income in the CDs register, adding to its cash balance, and then letting the daily One Step Update record the Transfer of the received cash to the checking account, after which I Match the transfer in the checking account register. It's clumsy, but it works for me. And then I Reconcile the cash balance in CDs monthly; it's almost always $0.00.
So, yes, MY Investment accounts can be reconciled. Perhaps yours are single-asset accounts that don't include cash balances?
I stated the issue clearly at the beginning of the thread (which I started). Quicken will not let me manually change the reconcile status of any transaction within an investment account. It simply will not let me change the status from say "c" to "R". Up to now, I have been able to do this (i.e. update the reconciled status manually). There are no error messages.
I did find this same issue recently posted on another thread at:
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BTW, why do you feel it necessary to be so condescending in your response? You asked a question and I answered it. Frankly I find quoting the prior context to make the thread needlessly long. If this is your attitude, please simply find someone else (or thread) to take out your frustrations on.
Dear Laura,
The account IS specified as an investment account. Also, you can in fact reconcile investment accounts. Contrary to what RC wrote, this can be done by going to Investing > Investing Activities > Reconcile an Account. To use this you have to be in the register of the investment account. You can also reconcile investment accounts by going to the Overview tab in the particular account and then go to Options in the Account Status section and select Reconcile this Account. I have manually reconciled my accounts with my paper statements for years and I do not know why this capability has suddenly changed.
------------------------------------- Laura wrote:
Tax and Accounting Software ForumsWeb and RSS access to your favorite newsgroup - alt.comp.software.financial.quicken - 19853 messages and counting! ##-----------------------------------------------##
I stated the issue clearly at the beginning of the thread (which I started). Quicken will not let me manually change the reconcile status of any transaction within an investment account. It simply will not let me change the status from say "c" to "R". Up to now, I have been able to do this (i.e. update the reconciled status manually). There are no error messages.
I did find this same issue recently posted on another thread at:
formatting link
BTW, why do you feel it necessary to be so condescending in your response? You asked a question and I answered it. Frankly I find quoting the prior context to make the thread needlessly long. If this is your attitude, please simply find someone else (or thread) to take out your frustrations on.
Dear Laura,
The account IS specified as an investment account. Also, you can in fact reconcile investment accounts. Contrary to what RC wrote, this can be done by going to Investing > Investing Activities > Reconcile an Account. To use this you have to be in the register of the investment account. You can also reconcile investment accounts by going to the Overview tab in the particular account and then go to Options in the Account Status section and select Reconcile this Account. I have manually reconciled my accounts with my paper statements for years and I do not know why this capability has suddenly changed.
------------------------------------- Laura wrote:
Tax and Accounting Software ForumsWeb and RSS access to your favorite newsgroup - alt.comp.software.financial.quicken - 19853 messages and counting! ##-----------------------------------------------##
Sorry if I sounded condescending, helpern. What I really meant to convey was frustration. And not really at you, but at
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You see, I read your messages here in the Usenet newsgroup, alt.comp.software.financial.quicken . I've never visited "rockryno.com" at all, except now, to check out what you are using. You posted your question in that "forum", which made you "Register" and everything, and probably gave you a feeling of "belonging" to their group, and of getting expert advice from other members of that group, advice not available to non-members.
Trouble is, the managers of that "forum" simply forwarded your question - with no context at all except for their self-serving footnote - to this Usenet newsgroup, where I read it and responded. Then rockryno.com posted my response on their "forum", giving you the impression that you had received a response from another member of that group. Rockryno did not bother to tell you that they had broadcast your post to the whole world on Usenet, and that the response had come from outside Rockryno.
Why do Rockryno's managers do this? For profit! Do you see all those ads and links on the Rockryno forum pages? Each click there generates revenue for Rockryno. Not for those of us who actually provided the advice - for free. And not for you.
This Usenet newsgroup is for peer-to-peer support by and for Quicken users. Many of us freely donate many hours a week to help our fellow Quicken users. But we are not happy to generate revenue for leeches like Rockryno, who simply relay questions and replies to and from Usenet, adding no value themselves.
That's why I may have sounded condescending, helpern. I wonder if you will even get to see THIS post. Rockryno's managers may filter it out so that you and their other "members" will not learn the way their system works. As of a few minutes ago, your message - the one to which I am now Replying - had not yet appeared on Rockryno.com.
If you don't know about Usenet, just ask. If you do know about it, use your newsreader (NOT your browser) to subscribe to alt.comp.software.financial.quicken and join in our FREE discussions of the good, the bad and the ugly facets of using Quicken. Heck, we won't even make you Register. And, since we will be seeing your whole conversation, not just the parts that Rockryno chooses to relay, you'll get much better help and advice - faster - without going through the middleman.
See you around the newsgroups! ; helpern had written this in response to
Well, I wouldn't go so far as to call Rockryno.com a "scam".
You can go there and take a look for yourself at THIS thread:
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As I expected, the site has not yet included the last few messages posted here. Chances are, "helpern" will never see this part of the discussion. :>(
Or click here, John, to see one of the many posts that YOU made to Rockryno - without realizing it, I'm sure:
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But Rockryno is no worse - and no better - than the many other "forums" that operate in the same way. In the Microsoft public newsgroups we continually see original posts that start off with, "I'm having exactly the same problem." Almost always, these posts have been forwarded from some forum like TechArena or The Egghead Café or VistaHeads...or from some unidentified forum via the "vBulletin USENET gateway". These bare-naked posts never include any context because the poster doesn't know that his post is going to the whole Usenet world. He thinks he's posting to the exclusive group who belong to his "forum", so readers can see the prior messages for context - including the "exact problem" that was already described in some previous post - which he can clearly see on his screen, but we NG readers cannot.
In addition to the non-sequitur problem, even normal posts in legitimate threads have to be relayed back and forth between the forum and the newsgroup. This often results in messages that are out of sequence or delayed or simply lost - carelessly or by a computer outage or intentionally or otherwise.
The biggest problem is lack of disclosure by the "forum" managers, and lack of understanding by the "members" of the "forums". The biggest annoyance is the situation we are seeing here in this Quicken NG: "drive-by" posts that arrive from the "forums" with no context, followed by innocent non-sequiturs by posters - both here and there - who don't realize what is happening.
SOME of the forums do provide a useful service. They relay questions from posters to NGs frequented by experts who can offer help, then relay the responses back to their members. SOME of the forums are actually run by managers who are experts in their own right, and they often create their own posts with lots of help. My only complaints with THESE forums is that they sometimes do relay "naked" posts, and that they don't always CLEARLY disclose to their members just how the system works.
The only "cheating" that I see is that the forum managers reap revenue from content that they did not create, and that they do not even disclose this to the actual creators. When we offer advice in this Quicken NG, we intend for readers to benefit from it. When it is propagated widely, more readers can benefit - and that's A Good Thing. But when others profit from advice we've given freely, without adding any significant value themselves, then that is cheating.
The "cheaters" didn't create the situation. They are just profiting from the strengths - and the weaknesses - of Usenet.
And I don't know how the situation can be remedied without hurting innocent users of the system.
Which I believe is the "scam". Those forums can't afford to allow their posters so know what's really happening or they would lose those "eyes" they need to make money.
Yes, I was referring to those that are profiting; not the presumed innocent posters.
But that's the usual case when cheating takes place, I believe. Cheaters want something for nothing; they don't usually expend any more effort than necessary ... and there are plenty of opportunities for them ... especially in free and open societies. Not much of a defense though.
Education would be my first choice. I don't see how any innocent users will be hurt by knowing that they can come directly to this newsgroup (or to the Quicken Live Commuity) for example and get the same answers they would have gotten before ... without the middleman and the advertising. If the forums in question had something legitmate to offer, they wouldn't need to disguise what they're doing.
Some enterprising souls should be able to come up with ways to get the word out over the internet. If there are posts exposing the problem and a dearth of responses to posts from forums like rockryno; perhaps their revenue source will eventually dry up.
Do you think adding a signature tag (to regular posters' signatures) pointing the reader to usenet would be enough education? Or, would a functional tag be too complicated for users not even aware of Usenet? The obvious ones would include something like news://alt.comp.software.financial.quicken which probably won't work on many PCs, especially the ones owned by people who don't use Usenet. Or would the relayers just filter out that tag line?
But my thought, when I suggested "education", was anything that got the message out that this sort of scam was going on.
I'm not foolish enough to think that the television networks would voluntarily publish this, much less the school system: but today, we do not need to depend on traditional methods for the dispensing of information that results in "education". Anyone can now publish the sort of information that can bring down a scam ... be it a rockryno scam or a Dan Rather lie.
Exactly, I was wondering about non-traditional approaches. Something that distributed the education about the group into the responses to questions. For instance, a line in frequent poster's signatures might help. Perhaps something like "news://alt.comp.software.financial.quicken, Your source of user to user Quicken help".
The problem with that specific text is that Windows doesn't provide a functional, easy to use news reader. And news reader requires configuration of the news server's hostname. As a result, a novice can't just click on the URL. One could use Google Groups in the URL but some long time Usenet users killfile messages originating there.
Mike news://alt.comp.software.financial.quicken, Your source of user to user Quicken help
To illustrate, this works for me but probably won't work for you because you are not a subscriber to Grande Communications:
You'll have to substitute the name of YOUR news server between news:// and alt. (Would that be news.eternal-september.org ? That would make yours: news://news.eternal-september.org/alt.comp.software.financial.quicken - but that doesn't work for me.) And each reader will need to make a similar substitution, so there's no good way that I know of to make a Sig with a URL that works for everybody. :>(
The "news://" portion of a URL works much like "http://". It tells the browser to use NNTP (Network News Transfer Protocol), rather than HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), to access the Internet. When Windows sees this, it fires up your default newsreader, which might be OE or WM or WLM - or a third-party client like Thunderbird or Agent, but I don't know anything about those. What I say next relates to the MSFT newsreaders; YMMV if you use something else.
The newsreader then tries to connect you to the NNTP server specified after the "news://". If you already have an account on that server, it looks for the newsgroup named after the final "/" in the URL and, if it finds that NG, downloads the 300 newest messages there and displays the latest post in the Reading Pane.
What happens if you don't have an account on that news server? I don't really know. The Microsoft public news servers (msnews.microsoft.com) are free and do not require a logon or password. (Anybody can click on news://msnews.microsoft.com/microsoft.public.windows.live.mail.desktop and reach the NG for peer-to-peer support of WLM; the News Account on the MS server will be created automatically if it doesn't yet exist.) Since I already have a paid account on Grande Communications, I don't know what happens to a non-subscriber.
Perhaps you could change the line in your Sig to something like:
Sorry about the goof; this isn't my area of expertise, and I certainly wasn't paying attention to what I was doing when I created that signature. Thanks for the insights.
I'm trying again; I think putting in my newserver would be more confusing to more folks, than trying to tell the reader to substitute their own newserver.
Don't be completely against "compilation forums" of this nature - I would have had no idea this group existed without a website to inform me about it, and now I no longer need to visit the website to see the information from the group.
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