"jo" wrote
I let Quicken (11) enter placeholder entries for a large number of preferred stocks which were recently purchased in an account. Because of a problem I mentioned a while ago (either Quicken's or the brokerage.. I haven't figured out which), although the existence of the new securities is recognized, the transaction to buy them is not. Because there were so many, I thought it was faster to let Quicken adjust the holdings to get the right number of shares at least and I would go back and enter the costs. I chose to enter the Buy transaction for the ones I was correcting, but I see from the screen that it is different from Buy screens for securities I've entered directly (i.e not from the resolve placeholder screen). It does not have an option for which account to subtract the cash from, and I can now see that none of the total costs for these securities is getting taken out of my cash balance for this account.
Quicken's help screen says that this is just how it is supposed to work, although I don't understand why. It certainly isn't how *I* want it to work,since it is now making it seem like I have more cash in the account than I do. I don't know how to change this. What am I missing and how can I get Quicken to do the logical (to me ) thing?
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Quicken *is* working as intended.
No transaction governed by a placeholder can change any cash balance.
A benefit of the intended operation is that users can get an investment account setup when they do not have access to old transactions for the account (or don't want to enter them all at once) and when they do not have the account that funded the purchases (the account which contributed the cash to the investment account) setup in Quicken.
If you plan to enter every transaction in the investment account, and you have the account that is the source of the cash setup in Quicken, you don't need the placeholders, and you may not want them.
To eliminate the problem, you can: delete the placeholders; delete any transaction affected by the placeholders (the affected transactions will have "N/A" in the "Cash Amt" column *); then re-enter the non-placeholder transactions you deleted.
Alternatively, you could stick with your original plan (keep the placeholders); but change the transactions that supplied the cash to the investment account so they are not transfers into the investment account. You could make them transfers back into the account in which they are entered. Example: if the source of the cash is an account named "Checking Account", you could change the transfers transactions in that account to have "[Checking Account]" in their Category field, instead of "[Investment Account]".
[ * There may also be "XIn" transactions with a non-zero amount in the "Cash Amt" column and the text "Balancing Cash Adjustment" in the "Description" field ... they will be automatically deleted when the transactions with "N/A" in the "Cash Amt" field are deleted.]