I want to experiment and reorganize Quicken

Gary,

I have 18 different Fidelity (and other funds through Fidelity) in 4 separate Fidelity accounts (including FLPSX - a big winner for me). A couple of funds are in multiple accounts. I also have separate brokerage accounts with multiple stocks and a couple of other mutual fund accounts with multiple funds. All my statements show a consolidated total with detail equity lines.

I have no problem reviewing individual funds. In Quicken Premier 2005, I use the security detail view under the investing menu to check individual results. You can set for market value or price history for several different time frames. Up and down arrows move from equity to equity. There are also a number of reports and graphs you can customize for individual or groups of equities.

If you reconcile monthly/quarterly statements you're liable to find balancing to become an onerous task with individual equity accounts. For example, I have Cash Reserves in all my Fidelity accounts. I'd have to make a single entry or numerous entries to record dividends. As I occasionally screw up, finding the error could be a nightmare. I reconcile to the total account and only delve into the detail if something doesn't tie.

Hope this helps.

slb

Gary wrote:

Dear slb:

I'd agree with you 100% if there were only one (minor) addition to Quicken that would allow me to trace errors (my errors are not occasional...they sometimes seem to be the rule rather than the exception):

When looking at some report or at the Security Detail View, if Quicken added a column of "Shares Owned", then it would be possible to get a proper register that said something like:

Date Trans Shrs $ Shrs owned

That last column allows me to see if I have hit the target of "Shrs Owned" that is in my statement from Fidelity or anyone else, and, if not, where I have gone astray.

The only place I have seen this column in Quicken is inthe registry for an account in which I only own one Mutual Fund. That's the appeal to reorganize that way.

I've requested that >Gary,

So have I (at least to the Investment Transaction report).

But I wouldn't consider using a Single Mutual Fund account as a workaround to getting that improvement in Quicken.

Single Mutual Fund accounts are extremely restrictive (you can't do a Corporate Spinoff, or a Corporate Acquisition, in one, for example). They can lead to bigger problems (a SMF account, can "evolve" into an IRA ... which will lose its visible SMF designation, but retain its SMF restrictions ... leaving the user - who has forgotten how the evolution occurred - wondering why the restrictions are there).

And, if you intend to download, you can not arbitrarily choose how you organize your investment transactions: you must put them in Quicken accounts that agree with the assignment to accounts that the financial institution downloads.

I try to reconcile once a month, and I have Portfolio Value reports that provide subtotals to (usually) match the subtotals I get from the fi. I don't generally have a big problem finding differences and correcting them. But if I must get a subtotal or a running total, I export the transactions to Excel.

Gary,

Have you tried the Portfolio item under Investing on the menu bar? It has a wealth of information and is very customizable. I created several custom views to review the entire portfolio of accounts and different funds in my Fidelity (and other) accounts. You can also change the As of date to see your accounts and funds at any point in time. Pretty cool.

Works very well for my needs. There are multiple tabs -- Today's Data, Performance and Analysis in addition to Portfolio with lots of good information. In addition you can click on any fund and go to the detail for that item, including the complete transaction history -- buys, sells, dividends, etc.

Buy the way, I agree with John 100% on the single mutual fund. I went down that route and quickly ran into almost every issue he raised. Had to rebuild a couple years worth of transactional data. Don't want to do that again. I also use John's suggestion to export to Excel. My bone to pick with Quicken is the extremely limited report writer capabilities. I created a series of detail reports, drop into Excel, and play to my heart's content (my wife thinks I'm somewhat anal -- tracking automobile cost per mile for the past 12 years).

But then what do you expect for a $35 piece of software?

Regards, slb

John Pollard wrote:

John:

Althyough I have Excel, I don't use it much so I'm not very proficient in it.

Could I request a brief tutorial in the steps I'd need to go through to export investment transactions from Quicken account (say having two different equities in it), import it into Excel, and get a running total of Shares of each equity Owned.

I can probably figure out the Quicken end, assuming one of the Print|File options allows me to go to a .csv file.

Thanks >Gary wrote:

The specifics of getting the Quicken data out of Quicken and into Excel for your purposes may vary slightly from Quicken version to Quicken version. At least in the newer versions there are two avenues, both start with the creation of a Quicken report (I'm thinking Investment Transactions), then either: Copy the report to the clipboard (with the report displayed in Quicken there should be a "Copy" or "Export Data" menu item visible); or Print, then select "Tab delimited file". Naturally if you have copied the report to the clipboard, you'd "Paste" it into Excel, if you created a tab delimited file, you'd "open" it or "import" it into Excel.

Like you, I don't use Excel that much. I have done what you want in the past, but I always forget how I did it. Thanks to a nice person in the Excel newsgroup, I have been reminded how.

After you have your Investment Transactions in Excel, insert a new column (probably just to the right of the "Shares" column. For example purposes, suppose that the first row that contains Quicken transaction data is row 5. Suppose that the "Shares" column is "G", so your newly inserted column is "H". In cell H5, enter the formula "=SUM($G$5:G5)" ... without the quotes. Then copy cell H5 into all the subsequent cells in column H.

There are probably a bunch of Excel experts here who could give you even better advice, but the above seems to work for me.

After pasting the info into Excel:

1. Cleanup the data to leave only column headings and the stock name, shares for each transaction, and money for each transaction.
2. Highlight ALL of the data and select Data-Sort and select the stock name column as primary and, if you want, another column as secondary.
3. Do the sort.
4. Again highlight ALL of the data and select Data-Subtotals and choose the column(s) (shares and/or money) you want subtotaled.
5. Do the Subtotal.

Eric