Placeholder Transactons - cant dismiss warning screen

Use the "Adjust Shares" function to make it right.

I've not heard of this before, so I'm not sure how much I can help; but I'd like to clarify a few things anyway.

Are you saying that the box-that-won't-go-away appears immediately when you open the Vanguard account after a download ... and everytime after when you open the account ... unless you transfer cash into the account? Or do you only see the box if you take a specific action in the Vanguard account, such as "select" the downloaded "placeholder"?

Once you have transferred cash into the Vanguard account, you never see the warning dialog box again?

Is there absolutely no other way to get out of the box besides clicking "OK"? No "X" in the upper-right corner? No other buttons to choose from?

Do the downloaded placeholders seem to be "correct"; that is, do they correctly alter your share balance in the respective securities, resulting in your Quicken holdings matching your true Vanguard holdings?

Do you notice anything in particular that these placeholders have in common. Are they always for the same security, or securities? Do they always appear when there are other transactions for the same securities as the placeholders?

It would be good to know why the placeholders are being sent by Vanguard; I would not think there should be a necessity for frequent, if any, placeholders to be downloaded by your fi, after all, who but they would know what real world transactions were executed in the account you hold with them - and I am not aware of any real world "Adjust Shares" (placeholder) transactions.

I have several accounts with Vanguard, but only switched to Q2005 around the 20th of April, so I have only had the opportunity of downloading a couple of money market reinvestments; I have not seen any placeholders from Vanguard yet.

i have the same issue - in quicken help it says these are typical of 401k accounts and are unavoidable - it has to do with cost basis or something llike that. I do not have them for non 401k vanguard accounts. I even tried disabling electronic downloading , cleaning up those placeholders, got everything perfect and then after enabling downloads, got the same thing. it does not mess up my totals, shares etc - just a visual nuisance.

alan

The box appears when I use the download page summary to go to the account. The only way I can get out of my Vanguard account is to use windows task manager to end the Quicken program. When I restart Quicken, all is OK until I open the Vanguard account. Then the dialog box comes back.

On the onestep update screen it said "downloaded 16 transactions from Vanguard" When I went to the Vanguard account the dialog box was there and I could see the placeholders in the downloaded transactions box. Correct. It happened to me about 3 weeks ago. I did a payroll split allocation and stopped showing up. It was gone till last night after I downloaded/updated.

There is an OK button as well as a red X. Neither make the box go away. It blinks out and comes back. I must have clicked it 30 times, it blinked out, and came back each time.

Really hard to tell if they are valid. they are for a really small amount of shares like 0.008 shares

I have 4 securities in this account. All have placeholders. When I did my initial transfer from Quicken 2001 to Q05 and when I did the on line update thing placeholders first appeared. I took no action as they were for a really small amount of shares total. I am not really sure how to resolve them, in all honesty.

Actually it should not be hard to tell if they are valid at all. If the result of the placeholders causes you to hold (in Quicken) the exact same number of shares that you hold at Vanguard, then they are "valid" (in their own special way). If the placeholders create a share balance that does not agree with your holdings at Vanguard, then the placeholders are invalid. It's as simple as that ... the number of shares - however small - is immaterial.

In my experience financial institutions do not send "adjustments" to my investment accounts; the transactions they download correctly account for the number of shares that I own. I think it is possible you will need to call Vanguard and ask them why they are sending placeholders ("Adjust Share Balance" entries).

But I also think you should be able to determine the underlying

Having said that, I am totally confused as to why you would be put into a loop to respond to the warning dialog box. While I would guess that you could "solve" the problem by getting correct downloads from Vanguard, it also sounds like Quicken is not handling the situation correctly either. I have nothing to offer on that subject; if true, I think you should submit a bug report to Intuit.

On Fri 27 May 2005 08:21:33p, John Pollard wrote in news:wIPle.12499 $Is4.10130@attbi_s21:

I don't believe any investment FIs "send" placeholders at all. I believe they send your holdings as they have done all along in older releases. Quicken will then create placeholders if necessary to make your register match your FI's list of holdings (but usually only after it prompts you to OK this creation of placeholders).

I generally agree and that is pretty much what I was getting to. But unless the op confirms otherwise, the op's description of what happened did not include any option to accept any adjustments. (In fact several posters here have intimated that they got placeholders in their accounts without the option of accepting them ... I don't recall getting confirmation of that though). I was attempting to elicit more info from the op to see if there was a point in the process where the placeholders could have been refused, among other things.

For perspective: a placeholder is nothing more than an Adjust Share Balance transaction, which any fi *could* send if they chose.

I have repeatedly said here that I do not think users should accept Quicken's invitation to enter adjustments in their registers, except perhaps under the most limited of circumstances and only after being certain that there was no better way to handle the situation.