Hi,
I've got two Fidelity IRA accounts that have the incorrect balance in Quicken. I do not know why this happened - but I would like to attempt to delete (clear?) the accounts and redownload the data (from scratch?).
Any guidance on how to proceed?
TIA
You might (just might!) consider simply adjusting the opening balance of the account to force a correct ending balance if you can not download all your data. This is a brute force method, and all balances up to the current balance might not be correct, but at least all your transactions will still be intact in the Q account.
Not the best solution, but something to think about.
depends how many records involved. Compare the error balance in each account and you may have the answer "pop out" as obvious
I would not go that route as my first choice. I would attempt to determine what the underlying problem is and correct that.
[You can't re-download transactions to a existing Quicken account: once a transaction has been downloaded, Quicken will never again present that transaction to the user if it appears in a subsequent download.You would have to delete the existing account and set it up again to re-download any previously download. transactions. But even that will not guarantee to download all previously downloaded transactions. Deleting accounts should be the very last resort for addressing any Quicken problem.]
For your problem, start with the fundamentals: the "balance" in an investment account consists of the value of the securities held in the account plus the value of the cash held in the account.
The accuracy of the "cash value" should be easy enough to check against a printed statement. It's the actual cash held; plus possibly the value of money market funds, if those funds are reported as "cash".
The accuracy of the "securities value" depends on Quicken having the correct number of shares owned and the correct price/share for each security held.
You can compare the number of shares held in Quicken against the number of shares held at the financial institution using the Quicken Investment > Portfolio Value report compared to a printed statement from the financial institution (make sure the ending dates agree). If the number of shares in Quicken is incorrect, there must be one or more Quicken transactions missing, extra, or incorrect.
It should not be too difficult (maybe time-consuming, but not complex) to compare the Quicken transactions against the transactions reported on your printed statement - and manually correct any differences.
If all Quicken securities have the correct number of shares owned, and the account "securities value" still disagrees with the financial institution, then there must be one or more incorrect prices for the date of comparison.
At Investing > Investing Tools > Security Detail View selecting a specific security then choosing Edit Price History from the "More" dropdown, will present all the historical security prices Quicken has stored for the selected security.
In that dialog, you can Add new prices, Delete existing prices or modify existing prices to correct any possible errors.
To help narrow down when the Quicken account might have gotten out of balance, you can use the Quicken Net Worth report. If you use an Interval of Month, you can compare monthly Quicken values to monthly financial institution statements.
And on the Customize > Display tab in the Net Worth report, you can check the box for "Account detail"; which will cause Quicken to list Tag subtotals for non-investment accounts and Security subtotals for Investment accounts. That may help locate the discrepancies.
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