Phantom "Margin" Entry

"jaygreg" wrote

I'm not clear if you are reporting that Quicken is showing a non-zero amount for the Margin amount or whether you are asking why the line is there at all. There is a Margin line on the Balances tab for everyone of my Quicken brokerage accounts that download; but since I don't trade on margin, its value is always zero. If your Margin value is zero, I doubt that just its presence is related to any downloading problem you are having.

Revert to the backup you made before they got merged?

I can't picture how two Quicken accounts got merged; maybe if I could it would help me think of a better answer.

The Margin line shows $145,350.19. I have no Margin account. I thought, perhaps, the line could feed to there under certain conditions other than the user placing it on the line.

As for the BU... I may have to do that but it will have to come from a Zip drive that may not have been updated for several weeks. The program's backup is not reliable; my main computer was hit with a virus right after I had my very first online bill paying session. That complicates matters.

As for the two accounts merging, it may have occurred when I was attempting to place one Online through the setup wizard. I have to look deeper into this. But anticipating that I'll not be able to pinpoint the root cause, I'll need to remove each of the entries that were in the Fidelity brokerage (fortunately not many transactions) and place them back into it. What appears to have happened, is that I selected the Fidelity account to place on line and when I executed my bill-paying session, it moved the transactions from Fidelity into an investment account called STOCKS (those for which I hold certicificates in a safety deposit box) then whipped out the Fidelity account all together. I can't find a trace of it. The numbers appear OK but the transactions got moved. But... when I look at the STOCKS account through the edit window, I find it listed as a Fidelity Investments institution... which it isn't.

I also noted that when I highlight a transaction in STOCKS and go to the EDIT/TRANSACTIONS tab, the "Move Transactions" option is not available; it's greyed out. That appears to be the case for every account that was formerly listed as a BANK or ASSET account and subsequently moved into the INVESTMENT category. I remember you telling me many investment accounts had banking provisions so moving them into the Investment category would be permissible. I never examined the results closely after I made that move. Perhaps the "Move Transaction" function wasn't available immediately after that transfer/move. In any event, I've got to move some transactions out of STOCKS, change the status of STOCKS to something other than a Fidelity Institution affiliate, and find or recreate at Fidelity Brokerage account.

"jaygreg" wrote

I think you have no control over whether there is a Margin line on the balances tab, and no control over the value reported there: I believe all the info on that tab comes in the download.

If you can do a Web Connect download from the fi, it might be worth perusing the QFX file to see what the fi is sending for the Margin value.

It's sounding to me like you may have some corruption problems. You could try a Validate on a Quicken "Copy" of your data.

"Move transaction" is not available for true Investment accounts; but if I change the group of a checking account to "Investing", it still retains the ability to "Move transaction" (Q2005 Deluxe R3).

I don't remember saying anything quite like that, but then my memory is not all that good anymore. :)

Investment accounts in newer versions of Quicken do have banking capabilities, including check writing, but I'm not sure how that affects regrouping a non-investment account into the "Investing" group.

(I can tell you that I just discovered that if you do move a non-investment account into the "Investing" group, you will not be able to print an Investment Transaction report.)

I'd still be looking for backups at this point.

But if push comes to shove, you can export to qif, and import from qif. You may be able to select transactions to export based on date, you may have to do some deleting of transactions from the qif file, you may want to export to two qif files, or split one qif file into two, you may even find it useful to use an old backup to export transactions from its accounts; but you can probably "move" your transactions that way.

Here are some instructions for importing non-cash account transactions via qif in Quicken versions later than Q2004.