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Entering Securites That I've Owned For a Long Time: Catching up in Quicken

I want to start entering my stock and mutual fund investments in Quicken. For instance, I just recieved a dividend check for some Con Edison stock and would like to record it.

The problem is that I've owned this stock for at least 11 years. Perhaps at some point, I will key in all the prior transactions and dividends that led up to this point. I know I want to at least dig up the purchase date and price and enter that. In the meantime, is there a reasonably good way to pick up at this point and track going forward? What might that be?

Also, in the early 1990s for a couple of years I used Quicken to track my security investments. Only recently have I restarted using it. Some early efforts to find my old Quicken backup disks were unsuccessful. If I happen to find them, would there be a way to merge those old records with the new Quicken files I am just starting? That might enable me to at least fill in some security purchase prices and dividend reinvestment information.

Cheers, TomBk

Reply to
TomBk
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Yes it is reasonably simple.

Pick a statement you want to start from. Say June 30, 2005. Enter your holding as a Share transfer in on that date. Enter all subsequent transactions, including your most recent dividend.

From this point on, you'll get an accurate value of your holdings.

When you have time, go back another six months. Enter all the transactions from your statements, and delete the June 30 transfer in.

This way, you can continue attacking it piecemeal and go back as far as you want.

Reply to
Fred Smith

Hi Fred, Sounds good. I like the breaking it down in to managable sections and doing a piece at a time idea. Thanks.

By the way, does that work with a checking account also, in case I wanted to try that? I took a stab at that with a few months and it seemed kind of confusing with balance adjustments coming in and then all the subsequent balance adjustments got thrown off. I haven't figured out yet if it's doable with a reasonable amount of effort once I got the hang of sorting out the adjustments. Cheers, TomBk

Reply to
TomBk

Hi Fred, Sounds good. I like the breaking it down in to managable sections and doing a piece at a time idea. Thanks.

By the way, does that work with a checking account also, in case I wanted to try that? I took a stab at that with a few months and it seemed kind of confusing with balance adjustments coming in and then all the subsequent balance adjustments got thrown off. I haven't figured out yet if it's doable with a reasonable amount of effort once I got the hang of sorting out the adjustments. Cheers, TomBk

Reply to
TomBk

Yes, it does work with banking accounts. Start the same way: enter an opening balance on say, January 1st, 2005. Then enter all the transactions which have gone through your bank account. When you have more time, enter your 2004 transactions, and delete the Jan 1/05 opening balance transaction.

The only time you get balance adjustments is when you reconcile. There's no value reconciling old transactions, as you can tell by the balance at the end of each statement period whether you've entered all the transactions.

The only problem with this method is sometimes expenses don't show up in the proper month (if payees haven't cashed their check for a while). You can fix this after you're confident all the history has been entered correctly by simply changing the date to the date the check was written rather than cashed.

Reply to
Fred Smith

Thanks again Fred, That sounds like a smoother process than what I was doing. I was trying to reconcile each past month, and it was complicating things with a balance adjustment each time. Regards, Tom

Reply to
TomBk

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