offsetting placeholders

Not really sure what would cause that. Possibly a conversion problem, possibly some bad data in the Q2003 file.

I can't think of any reason why you couldn't delete any offsetting placeholders, but whatever made Quicken think they belonged there would probably remain and could possibly cause similar events in the future.

Placeholders can be "hidden", so perhaps there are even other placeholders that you are not seeing. You can tell Q2006 to display hidden investment transactions in your Quicken "Preferences"; that might help get some visibility. You can also see all placeholders in an Investment Transaction report; where you could select transactions for a single security to try to get a picture of what is happening. (You can even select

*just* placeholders in the Investment Transaction report; they are "Adjust Share Balance" transactions).

If nothing leaps out from deeper investigation into the Q2006 file, I would suggest, if possible, to revert to Q2003, do a Validate and a super Validate on the final Q2003 file (backing up first), then reinstall Q2006 and reconvert, using the super Validated Q2003 file.

One other thought occured to me as I was about to click send. Did you have Adjust Share Balance transactions in your Q2003 file? If so, I think they could be contributing to the problem: I don't have any insights at the moment, I try to never use adjusting entries, but I think they are fairly common in 401k accounts where actual transactions may be hard to come by.

John, Thanks for you suggestions (which I tried all of) but that wasn't it. So for the record and for the benefit of those poor souls that may have the same problem in the future here's what it was. Back in an earlier version of quicken I had the security in a single fund account of type IRA (don't think they even had the 401K option then). When the 401K option came along (I think for me it was with Q03), I created a 401K account and transferred the shares to that account. Worked fine in 03 (which was before the advent of placeholders). But now in Q06 it turns out that they want to keep track of the "cash source" in all kinds of buckets, e.g.. employer match, etc. My

401K is with FidelityNetBenefits, and they apparently show my shares as being "unknown source"; however, the shares I transferred in were categorized as "Rollover from another account". So that was what was causing the mismatch. To fix it I simply accepted the placeholders. Then using the "edit Cost' link I changed the "Cash source" to "Unknown source" for all of my entries one at a time, and Bingo, that fixed it!

Bob

Thanks for posting back with that valuable insight.

While I never would have guessed it in your specific case, I have long suspected that having Single Mutual Fund accounts could create problems never dreamed of by users, or sometimes, Intuit.

I am curious if you remember specifically how your Single Mutual Fund account became a non-Single Mutual fund account. Do you remember if Quicken offerred you an option to have Quicken convert it (during a conversion from one version of Quicken ... or directly in an existing version, as you can now do in Q2005/Q2006), or if you created a brand new account and exported to QIF then imported the QIF file to the new account?

Also, if you would be so good: could you elaborate a bit on how you discovered the various "buckets" Quicken was using to keep track of the source of your 401k cash?

I have, on occasion, suggested to posters that a Single Mutual Fund account might be (have been) a source of a problem ... but because often a user forgets about whether the account has been changed (by any means) to a non-Single Mutual Fund account; I am reluctant to bring it up, thinking they won't remember and they may not be able to do anything about it anyway. I think some of the problems relating to SMF accounts are virtually irreconcilable; I am glad that yours could be overcome, and I hope that I will remember the specifics of your problem for future questioners. Please do remind me if I forget.

Again, thanks for sharing the solution.

I don't think the problem was necessarily the single fund account. That is I had several single fund accounts back then and as I recall I simply used the transfer to another account option to remove the shares from each single fund account and then add them to the new 401-K type account. (anyway that's what the transactions look like now: remove and add)

With the benefit of hindsight this is how to identify the "buckets". The initial placeholder dialog that comes up when Quicken first identifies the problem (following a download or doing a compare to portfolio) is confusing as it shows the offsetting adds and subtractions for the same security but does not show the fact that each "security" is actually further differentiated by cost type. To see that you have to accept the placeholders into the register and then choose the edit cost link for one of the placeholders. That brings up a screen which shows all of the transactions leading to the mismatch in a scroll window (along with a most confusing "summary" at the bottom!). Above the scroll window, is a title that includes the type of cost transactions(employee match, etc.) summarized below. It's really easy to miss if you aren't looking for it. Then if you do the same steps on the offsetting placeholder you will discover it is for a different cost type such as "unknown source".

To correct the problem you have to change the cost type for all of the offending transactions to be the same, most likely to "unknown source".[I guess it's possible some FI's actually download of all these various categories but I find that hard to believe] You can do this from the dialog mentioned above by hitting the edit button embedded on each transaction and then hitting the "Cash source" button. [A poor name in my opinion. Something like "Contribution Type" would have made more sense to me].

HTH Bob L.

Thank you again.

Bob, Do you use special software to format your news postings? If so I'd be interested to know what you are using, it seems to do a great job of reformatting fragmented lines.

Thanks

Nothing fancy just outlook express!

Not sure I can explain this adequately, but here goes. The placeholders came about with I think the 04 version and if memory serves me right it added one for every security in the account the first time a download was run. Two of us struggled with this for a while until a friend at work just deleted them ( he and I both sure of our existing figures) and after that they didn't appear any more.

Best explanation is something like the newer versions trying to "account" for your holdings under the new protocol.

Hope this made at least some sense.