Cannot sell ESPP shares in Quicken 2005 premier Release R6

Hi, Dave.

Quicken thinks you are trying to sell more shares than you own. The fact that they are ESPP shares doesn't matter, except that the ESPP (Employee Stock Purchase Plan, right?) arithmetic is very susceptible to fractional share differences from rounding.

Did you actually check the "sell all shares" box? Or did you put in the number of shares you sold? If you typed in a number - any number - you risk the possibility that Quicken might not agree with that number. You may be trying to sell 100 shares when Quicken thinks you have only 99.99999 shares. So it wants to record the sale of the 99.99999, plus a short sale of .00001 share. You can either go back and delete and re-enter all historical transactions, being scrupulous about NOT letting Quicken calculate the number of shares, or you can tell Quicken you sold ALL shares and accept whatever fractional number it may come up with.

This is not a new problem. We've discussed it here many times. Quicken's rounding process often produces results that we don't expect - and often those minor differences don't become apparent until much later. Such as when we sell all those shares. When we enter a transaction, we must always put in the exact dollars and cents, and we must enter the exact number of shares, including the decimal fraction, if applicable. Let Quicken adjust the per-share price, if necessary to make the arithmetic work, but don't let it adjust the number of shares. Mutual funds and ESPPs often record fractional shares, usually to 3 decimal points, so the purchase of 1 2/3 share would be recorded as 1.667. If we enter 1.667 shares in Quicken, we're OK. But if we enter 1 2/3 shares, Quicken might record it as 1.666667 internally, while showing only the 1.667. If we then try to record the sale of 1.667 shares, Quicken will want to record a short sale for the .000333 share difference. You can either correct your entries for the number of shares purchased, or let Quicken adjust to zero by telling it you sold ALL shares.

RC

Thanks for the info. I did some follow up work since I posted the question, I've set up a dummy account and tried to record buy/sell ESPP shares transactions - all went fine.

For my "real" account that I'm trying to use, I entered in a whole number of shares, and intended to sell the entire amount. I didn't see a box to check that said "sell all shares", but after typing in a number, I could use the "FIFO, max gain etc" boxes to allow quicken to select the shares. The summary screen showed that I had "X" shares available, and I asked it to record the sale of "X" shares.

I'm still stuck though, I can't seem to get it to allow me to do the sale. Based on your reply, it seems like quicken thinks I have a different amount of shares than I really do. I've looked at all my accounts, done reports by security type and I don't see any errors in the number of shares.

I saw a mention of using the CTRL-Z command that would re-calculate the number of shares that quicken thinks are in an account. I tried this and it didn't seem to do anything, even after setting the behavior of Ctrl-X, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-Z to be the quicken default rather than the windows default. (maybe the CTRL-Z was for an older quicken version?)

Also I've tried deleting the original ESPP purchase, and re-adding. No luck, I get the same errors when I try and re-do the transactions.

I've also tried a validate & super-validate with no avail.

Another item that may be of interest is that if enter an ESPP purchase, then try to do the sale, Quicken gives me the message that I need to record as two transactions, and that no transaction was recorded. If I then delete the *BUY* transaction, it gives an error dialog that references the Sale that supposedly wasn't recorded! I guess that's even more evidence that there's some mystery transaction that's in the Quicken database, although I'm unable to locate it.

Any suggestions on other things I could try? Thanks in advance, Dave

R. C. White wrote:

2/3 >> share would be recorded as 1.667. If we enter 1.667 shares in Quicken, >> we're OK. But if we enter 1 2/3 shares, Quicken might record it as 1.666667 >> internally, while showing only the 1.667. If we then try to record the sale >> of 1.667 shares, Quicken will want to record a short sale for the .000333 >> share difference. You can either correct your entries for the number of >> shares purchased, or let Quicken adjust to zero by telling it you sold ALL >> shares. >>

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Another update:

The control-Z recalculate works after all. You first select the "transactions" tab of the inventment account, then type cntrl-Z. You don't select the date field first, as one of the postings on the quicken forums suggested (probably applied to earlier quicken versions).

I can duplicate the problem as follows:

Create a new account file. Create a brokerage account in that file. Record a regular buy of a stock (don't know if this is required or not) Record a reverse split (I picked 10:1) Add an ESPP purchase, say 100 shares. Add an ESPP sale - you'll only be able to sell 10 shares before you get the window saying you need two transactions, one "regular" one short.

Questions: - Is it OK to have regularly purchased securities and ESPP purchases of the same security in the same investment account?

- if so, it seems like there's a bug in the program.

Am I missing anything?

Thanks again, Dave