Help - Adding 2nd security to IRA account

If I'm understanding you correctly, just click on the word "yes" alongside the description "Single Mutual Fund?" in the Account Attributes on the Overview tab of the account.

On an Account with an Investment Type of "Invest", I see listed "Single Mutual Fund?" in the attributes. But this is an Investment Type of "IRA", and "Single Mutual Fund?" is not shown. This is a Roth IRA. If I try to create a new Roth IRA account, it prompts for multiple ticker symbols then. But isn't there a way to see this without having to create a new account & move all my history?

The only situation I am aware of where you are limited to holding only a single security in an account is when the account is a Single Mutual Fund account. If you have a Single Mutual Fund account and convert it to an IRA account (one of the few account type conversions allowed) in Q2005, it loses its Single Mutual Fund properties ... but perhaps that was not always the case in previous Quicken versions.

If your account was never a Single Mutual Fund account, I have no idea why you can not hold multiple securities in it.

So, given what you have said so far (your first post was not terribly clear on what you tried and how Quicken responded), I would say you have little choice but to create a new account and enter your transactions there. You might be able to utilize QIF file export/import to help - despite the fact that Q2005 does not support importing QIF files specifically into investment accounts. If you need to resort to that, post back.

Thanks for the help John. But this is ridiculous! I can't use QIF to export/import anymore for an IRA account. I don't know how it was originally set up anymore or what version I was on, but geez, all I wanna do is add a 2nd security to the darn account and I can't do it...what a piece of crap! I've got a 100 transactions or so and do NOT want to have to type them all back into another account. I don't know why I keep getting sucked in further & further with Quicken...it seems to be getting worse as each new version comes along. Don't get me wrong, I like the nice new features, but something as basic as this seems like it should be able to be done!

Again...thanks for your help...dunno what I'm gonna do with this account...let the papers sit here on the desk for a few more days I guess, and then...?

As should be apparent, this is *not* "basic"; based solely on your explanation, something has gone wrong at some point - it could have happened long ago, several versions ago - its cause unknown. And I disagree with your assessment of Quicken's progress; you have supplied no evidence to relate your problem to the version you are now using, or to any version - the historical record of the events that caused your problem is essentially empty. And you are claiming to judge the overall value of versions of Quicken based solely on this one problem.

As I said, you *can* import into investment (and other "unsupported") accounts (though the results may not always be ideal); you just have to know how to do it.

I note that you still haven't posted specifics about just what you attempt and how Quicken responds.

And if it were me - and I knew I no other choice - I would just bite the bullet and manually enter transactions into a new account. I have entered a *lot* more than 100 historical transactions in my Quicken accounts over the years; I don't claim it's fun, but I know it was worth my effort.

As to QIF file export/import (for Q2005 and Q2006). First; there are no restrictions on the export of QIF files. Second, Quicken will import to any/every account type if you specify "All accounts" to the import process.

So the trick is to create a QIF file that Quicken believes contains "all accounts", but really only contains the transactions you are interested in. You can do that as follows:

1.) Backup your current Quicken data 2.) Add your new investment IRA account to your current Quicken file (enter no transactions). 3.) Make a Quicken copy of your current Quicken data fileset. 4.) Delete all accounts in that *copy* except your old and new IRA accounts. 5.) Export "all accounts" from the *copy* to a QIF file 6.) Modify the QIF file: delete the header data for the new IRA account (there should be no transactions); replace the name in the header of the old IRA account with the name of the new IRA account (spell the name *exactly* as created). [Alternatively, you could delete the header for the old account and cut/paste the header for the new account in place of the old]. 7.) Import "all accounts" in the resulting QIF file, to your *current* Quicken data file

If you do not like the results, you can revert to your backup from step 1.

I did the procedure you described...sounded like it should work good.

But I only got about 1/4 of the transactions to import back in. I found that all the transactions that were transfers originally from Checking or Savings acct for instance (NBUYX transactions), did not import back in. The reason is that even though the transactions had been exported to the qif, since I had previously deleted all other accounts, the link to the transfer account was not written out to the qif file...therefore when I imported them back in, none of those transactions came back...only those that had complete info came in.

I'm guessing I should just bite the bullet & start re-entering...agree?

Thanks for the help...JR

Is the Investment account a Single Mutual Fund account? If so, you can still try one or more additional steps.

Before you delete the old investment account, all its transfers should be in your file (transactions that were going to be deleted anyway) ... meaning that the other half of those transfers are also still in your file. So to the extent that those transfers were to non-investment accounts, I think you may be able to use Find/Replace to "fix" those missing transfers.

Find all [Old Investment Account] categories and change them to [New Investment Account]. (Old Investment Account is going to be deleted anyway).

It won't help for transfers between investment accounts; but I think it would re-create many of the missing transactions correctly. At some point, you might decide that the QIF file will save you enough manual keying to be worth the effort.

Actually, you will have to deal with the transfer issue one way or the other. Even if you manually entered every transaction into a new investment account, you would still then have to delete the duplicate halves of transfers that remained in other accounts from/to your non-Old Investment Account.

Thanks John...I got it to work by combining a little bit from your last 2 posts! Had to do some very minor editing but it looks good now. Thanks again!