I had this happen once before long ago and there was no solution except to manually enter the lost cost basis of every holding. It looks like the problem still exists. With the exception of pure stock holdings (I think that is the only category that worked), the cost basis for every bond, preferred, unit trust, etc is zeroed out after a transfer of holdings from one brokerage acct to another. I think it should work between different firms, but this is even more straightforward: it's the same brokerage firm but a different office and acct #. Since the cost basis is clearly held by quicken in the sending acct, I don't understand why it doesn't transfer with the asset. Any ideas on why it fails and any simple work around other than manual entry?
Absolutely, yes. And it has worked correctly in every single version of Quicken I have ever used.
Well that is informative ... but I can't tell you how it is happening.
There should be one Add Shares transaction (in the new account) for every "lot" in the old account. And each Add Shares transaction should show the Total Cost of the lot it represents in the old account.
As far as I can tell, there is no reason for the Add Shares transaction to have the "Price Paid" field involved in the transaction at all. The "transfer" should care less what the price/share was of the purchase in the old account ... it should only care about the Total Cost you paid for the shares of that lot. And that's what it does in every version of Quicken I have used.
As mentioned above: the "price paid" (per share) should not play any part in the new cost basis (unless the price paid for the shares in the old account was zero ... creating an "old" cost basis of zero).
I have no idea why you have a price paid of zero ... but I would start by looking at your price history for the securities involved.
[Also look at a Portfolio Value report for the old account on the day before you "transferred" the shares to the new account.]
I suspect it's some data corruption. I have NEVER seen your problem in any Quicken version I have used.
Start by recalculating your investment account "registers". Hold down the CTRL key and enter "Z" in each account.
If that doesn't help, try Validating a Quicken Copy of your data. If the Validated Copy does not exhibit the problem, make that Validated Copy your regular Quicken file.
You should also check you price history file for zero prices; and you should consider renaming your price history file, and recreating the price history. [Your Quicken price history file is named QDATA.QPH, where QDATA is the name of your Quicken data.] There are multiple ways to recreate your price history, though none are guaranteed to get every historical price back.
You might check to see if any of the securities in the old account had placeholders.
[Also, the price history file can appear to be ok even when it has some corruption that interferes with other activities. Renaming .QPH, downloading historical prices for the new .QPH, and retrying the transfer should be a fairly simple process. Backup first, so you can revert back it things don't improve.]
Assuming I'm fully understanding what your seeing, it seems to me it can't be any other way.
The Portfolio tab is a snapshot, "As of" the date selected.
If you have elected to have the Portfolio tab "Group by" Account, Quicken can't show you what is not in that account. You wouldn't want Quicken to show you the income you earned in the old account for a security that you don't even own in that old account on the "As of" date, right"? Likewise, how/why would Quicken transfer the income earned by a security in the old account to the new account, when it was not earned in that account?
If you want to see the total income for a given security (without regard to which account it was earned in), elect to "Group" the Portfolio tab by Security. When I do this, I see the same total income for a security the day before I transfer holdings and the day after I transfer those holdings.
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