Trying to resolve any remaining placeholders in my investment accounts, I went to the "Investing" tab and then clicked at the bottom of that page on the "show me" of the line:
*Placeholder Entries for missing data are used in these calculations. Show me.
This opens up a screen titled "Resolve Placeholder Entries" which shows - account by account - the equities which supposedly have placeholders. When I click on the "+" next to these securities however, the vast majority have NO placeholder! The various lots are shown but no placeholders. Not sure what that means or why these securities are listed in the "Resolve Placeholder Entries" screen if they have no placeholders.
Is there another more accurate way to locate placeholders in the various investment accounts without going through each one separately?
What I want to do is resolve any placeholders that might still exist in my accounts. I have very few that I have not resolved over time. So my question is how to locate any that still exist. I could of course go through each account and scroll down years worth of transactions - which would be tedious to do because I have over a dozen investment accounts each going back many years.
For that reason I took advantage of what seems to be a feature of Quicken:
Within Quicken 08 Deluxe opened at the tab called "investing" which shows in the middle section all my accounts, there is at the bottom of that screen a line that reads " *Placeholder Entries for missing data are used in these calculations. Show me. " The "show me" is a link that when clicked on opens a new window titled "Resolve Placeholder Entries" which shows - account by account - the equities which Quicken believes have placeholders.
That is the problem: most of the accounts listed in that window as having placeholders turn out to not have any placeholders! Still on that same screen, under the accounts Q believes have placeholders, there is a list of the securities Q says have placeholders. But when I click on the "+" next to these listed securities, the lots that appear do not contain placeholders. (One of maybe 10 really show the presence of a real placeholder which can be opened to be filled out with the missing transactions).
So my point is to ask why Quicken lists these securities as having placeholders when they do not. I believe someone else asked that question once before but I do not recall the response.
Other than scrolling down each individual account transaction screen, is there a way to quickly find all existing placeholders? The "Find" feature does not seem to have a search entry for "placeholder" which would have been nice.
If there are any placeholders, they would appear in the register, if you set the Quicken Investment Transactions Preference, "Show hidden transactions"; and should also appear in an Investment Transactions report. The account "register" can be sorted on "Action" which would put all the placeholders together; the report can select on Action, which would allow only placeholders to appear in the report.
Placeholders have an "Action" value of "Entry".
I have never used the "show me" link you are referring to, though I have seen a similar link on placeholder transactions in an account register. Since I have no placeholders and haven't used the link you're referring to, I can only guess at what causes what you're seeing.
If a placeholder exists in an account, and a transaction is entered (manually, or by downloading) in that account, for the security in that placeholder, with a transaction date on or before the placeholder transaction date ... that transaction becomes linked (my term, I don't know a better way to describe it) to the placeholder. That transaction will remain linked to that placeholder even after the placeholder is deleted; in fact the only way to unlink that transaction is to delete it, then re-enter it. [But you might want to test a theory I have: you might be able to accomplish the unlinking by modifying the transaction date of the linked transaction to a date in the future, then modifying the date back to its original value ... easier than deleting/re-entering ... if it works.]
You can observe the lasting effect of the linking of a transaction to a placeholder even after the placeholder is deleted, by noticing that the transaction will still not affect the cash balance in the account. And you can tell that a transaction is not linked to a placeholder by noting that it does affect the cash balance in the account.
Perhaps your "show me" link is reporting that there are still some transactions in the account that are linked to an old, deleted, placeholder.
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