Quicken 2011 R8 Problem with Bonds Bought

I have a fidelity account and when bonds are bought the quicken transaction comes in as a placeholder entry. I click on "enter cost" and update the transaction. No mater what I try there is no entry in the "Cash Amt" field so that the account cash is not reduced and my cash balance is wrong. I'm sure that I am missing something, as an ex ms money user I just don't know what.

Al

Reply to
Al Malone
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"Al Malone" wrote

I have a fidelity account and when bonds are bought the quicken transaction comes in as a placeholder entry. I click on "enter cost" and update the transaction. No mater what I try there is no entry in the "Cash Amt" field so that the account cash is not reduced and my cash balance is wrong. I'm sure that I am missing something, as an ex ms money user I just don't know what.

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To the best of my knowledge, no financial institution downloads placeholder transactions.

When you end up with a placeholder, it's almost always because you accepted a Quicken offer to adjust your holdings to match the holdings your financial institution downloaded. If you accept the offer, you get a placeholder for the difference in number of shares. If you reject the offer, you get no placeholder, and you can decide if/how to resolve the share difference.

[How you fix the share difference is partly up to what your financial institution actually downloaded, and partly how you want to handle things in your account. In the case of bonds, the general comment I'd make is that Quicken wants every security to be held in units of "shares"; not, for example, number of bonds. The basic idea would be to hold the proper number of "shares" of the bond, at a price/share, that causes the value of the bond in Quicken to equal the value of the bond at your financial institution. I'm not sure how Money handled bond holdings, nor do I know how the Quicken Money Converter handled the conversion of bond holdings.]

Placeholders always prevent any transaction linked* to them from changing the cash balance in the account; that's one of their purposes. They're ideal when you want to start a Quicken account out with a beginning share balance for a security which you bought long ago and do not maintain the account that was the source of the cash in Quicken. Conversely, if you plan to have every actual transaction in the account, you don't need, and probably don't want, any placeholders.

Once you've accepted a placeholder and linked any transactions to it, the only way to correct that situation is to delete the placeholder, then delete any transactions linked to it (the ones with "N/A" in the Cash Amt field), then re-enter the linked transactions.

[* Any transaction for a security named in a placeholder, dated on or before the date of the placeholder, will be linked to the placeholder and will not alter the cash amount in the account.]
Reply to
John Pollard

"If you accept the offer, you get a placeholder for the difference in number of shares."

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That's really not stated correctly.

You get a placeholder for the exact number of shares in the downloaded holdings for that security.

The placeholder tells Quicken that you own that exact number of shares of that security on that date. The placeholder will guarantee that you can never own any different number of shares of that security on that date.

If you add a transaction that would normally change the number of shares owned on the date of the placeholder, Quicken will adjust the placeholder to offset the shares in transaction you entered, keeping the number of shares owned on the date of the placeholder constant.

Reply to
John Pollard

John

Thank you for your explanation. I now understand placeholders and how to deal with them. I don't know how many times I read the Quicken info!

Thanks again, Al

Reply to
Al Malone

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