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Presence of future security prices cause the Account Bar balances to be wrong?

Hi all:

QD2010.

Recently sold all the securities in a regular Investment Account and spent all the money in the account. That is, after selling the securities the subsequent actions were "Withdraws", "WriteChks" and the recording of some dividends. The Capital Gains report for the sales was correct, reflecting the exact difference between selling price and cost basis. The Overview of the account showed the balance of the account as $0, as did the Net Worth and Balance reports. However, the Account Bar balance for this account was ~ ($215,000)!

Subsequent investigation revealed the source of the problem revolved around the fact that some of the sold securities had "future" security prices in Quicken's price history. These "future" prices came from entries I had made in anticipation of future events (e.g., dividend reinvestments) as an aid in planning.

I can't think of any programming logic that would make Quicken behave in this fashion and, in any case, it does seem like the dollar amounts in the Account Bar should reflect exactly the balance in the accounts themselves as of the date you have the file open.

Tom Young

Reply to
TomYoung
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Future prices have long been a potential problem in Quicken. But the problem doesn't seem to be frequent or consistent; I don't recall being able to reliably reproduce it for all situations where it has been reported.

In your case, if you had future transactions entered, that would almost certainly, and logically, affect "Ending" balances ... see below.

The account bar can show "Current" balances or "Ending" balances. When "Ending" balances are elected, the user should expect that to include "future" events ... just as the account registers do.

Reply to
John Pollard

Yup. True virtually everywhere in Quicken. If you run a Net Worth report with a date range of "Earliest to date", you won't see the problem ... because that is - essentially - the "current" balance. But if you run the Net Worth report with a date range of "All Dates", you'll get the equivalent of "Ending" balance.

Works the same in Q2010. I think that is/was the fundamental problem.

Reply to
John Pollard

I'm not sure where that option is. In my experience, Net Worth is shown at the foot of the Account Bar whenever "Show amounts" is selected.

But showing net worth, as already noted by Charlie K is not the issue ... the issue is what account balances you choose to display. And "Ending" balances definitely show "all" transactions.

I think this is a red herring; Quicken has been known to mix some unknown combination of corrupted data and/or bad code to produce incorrect investment account balances. Often that problem can be corrected by "recalculating" the investment account ... that would have been the first step I would have taken ... after backing up.

Still, it doesn't seem significant whether a balance caused by unwanted future transactions in a closed account, has the correct algebraic sign. Surely you aren't suggesting that you would not have complained if the unexpected balance had been positive.

Reply to
John Pollard

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