Using Quicken Premier 2006 and have not done any updates on my brokerage
account since the end of 2005. What is the best way to do this now? Online
One Step Update? I do think I tried that some time ago and it combined
From the manual:
Quicken needs both cost basis/amount invested and market price
(historical and/or current) information to perform investment
calculations. Derived performance measures such as gain (realized and
unrealized) and average annual return (IRR) will be affected if this
information is missing. If you are currently in the process of setting
up your investments in Quicken, or if you want to track only your
holdings and do not wish to perform detailed performance analysis or
tax tracking, then incomplete information and placeholder entries are
not a problem. It is important to be clear that certain performance
and tax calculations are not to be considered reliable unless Quicken
can work with complete and accurate historical information.
well - how active are they ?
what kind of transactions do they have ?
I mean, are they idle with respect to "trading"
and only are sitting there with basic Divs, LT/ST gains ?
I would try the One Step Update and see what you are able to download.
Then I would manually go thru your statements and just add those
transactions
up to the point where a One Step Update made it current.
They are still active accounts in my portfolio and they are either
buys/sells/dividends etc. They are up to date at 12/31/2005 but I have not
entered anything since then
Would the information have to be put in for the years separately? I want to
do this the easiest way possible so they are updated to 12/31/2007 with the
proper final totals so that I can update more frequently in the future.
I would always be safe to load the oldest first and move forward. You can
do a one step update (to see how much data is returned) or possible you
might be able to be able to load specific dates on the brokers site (likely
90 days per transaction). However, I recommend you do not accept the one
step update transactions until you get caught up to that point.
Also, you do not need to reconcile each month - when I dealt with history, I
reconciled quarterly. Saves a little time.
If you are not concerned with history and want to start with 1/2008, you can
simply do a Remove Share for items you don't own and Add Shares for Items
you do Own. You will need to add shares for each lot you purchase to have
the correct basis in the future.
Oilcan
A couple of other basic questions:
You say "not entered" vs "not downloaded" ?
Do the accounts have One Step Update capability,
or maybe just the manual Web Connect,
or at the bottom - NO online access.... like my kid's 529 accounts.
Also - based on the above scenarios,
why have you not updated the accounts since 2005 ?
Terri wrote:
I think the "best" way depends on you. For me, the "best" way to do
this would be to take each month's statement and enter the listed
transactions one-by-one. That way I could 1) enter the transactions
at my own pace, 2) review each transaction and select the best way (in
my opinion) to enter the transaction as opposed to Quicken's way of
entering the transaction, 3) balance each month end 's market value
per Quicken to each month's statement, giving me confidence that I'm
entering transactions correctly. At the end of the day I'd have a
better understanding of what went on in the account for the past 3
years and more confidence in the end result. Because of all that, I'm
willing to do the work.
If you aren't willing to go to that effort then you might try the One
Step Update route. It sounds like you might not have understood the
process when you tried it before. If, for example, you want to update
your Schwab brokerage account but you also have a Traditional IRA, a
Roth IRA and a SEP IRA at Schwab, Quicken will really want to update
ALL those accounts; if you don't read carefully and understand what
Quicken is asking you in the One Step Update process it would be easy
to combine transactions for all those Schwab accounts into your one
Quicken/Schwab brokerage account.
However, I'd be surprised if whatever Financial Institution you're
dealing with will have over 3 years of transactions available to
download via One Step Update, so you're probably going to have to
enter some (old) information manually, in any case.
Tom Young
OK - what if I deleted ALL the prior information from ALL the accounts and
just went to One Step Update and began anew with, let's say December 31
2007 - would this be disastrous? It is just too much work to go back and do
everything by hand.
wrote:
One problem with this approach is that you most likely would lose cost
basis information for older securities that you still have in your
portfolio.
Say, for example, you originally purchased a stock in various lots in
1990, 1991 and 1992. From 1993 to to the end of 2005 you sold some
of those shares from time-to-time, specifying different lots for
calculation of capital gain/loss. At the end of 2005 your Quicken
file would be carrying that lot/cost basis information for the stock
that remained, and that information would all be lost with the
deletion. It's almost a certainty that the downloaded information
would not include this kind of cost detail.
If, at this point, you did a One Step Update the FI would send along,
and Quicken would enter, transactions from the present back to however
long the FI provides this information (probably no more that 2
years.) Then Quicken would create "placeholders" (adjusting entries)
in your account to balance the sum of the transactions with current
balances provided by the FI. You'd end up with correct current
balances for securities but no reliable cost basis information for
older securities.
If you're unwilling to enter this information manually but still want
to have good cost basis figures for older stocks then the only other
option is to do a One Step Update and go back and "fill in" any gap
between the end of 2005 to the point the One Step Update information
begins, followed by deleting placeholder entries created by Quicken.
What I'd recommend you do is to back up your current files, do your
One Step Update, and see how far back the information goes.
Tom Young
I have finally realized another problem. My brokerage company shows only 4
accounts but I have broken those accounts that have mutual funds down to say
6 or 8 separate funds. When I go to update, it only shows the MASTER account
and of course, not the separate funds. Now what? Start all over? Out of the
4 accounts, 2 have been broken down by me and entered manually for years,
but am still at that point where I got lazy and have not updated since
2005....Any further suggestions?
wrote:
You need to combine the Accounts to match the broker if you want to do an
automatic download. Search this Group in Google as this has been discussed
many times on different ways to accomplish this.
Oilcan
wrote:
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