Resolving placeholder entries

"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]".

I guess I'll have to take the delete placeholders approach because I didn't transfer cash into this account for these purchases; it was already there as a result of accumulated dividents and sales. Thanks for explaining the reason why placeholders work as they do. I knew there had to be a valid reason,but just couldn't think of it. I sure wish I could figure out why I lose transactions so often. i'm not sure if they are always Buys of new securities, but at least most of them are.

"jo" wrote

I guess I'll have to take the delete placeholders approach because I didn't transfer cash into this account for these purchases; it was already there as a result of accumulated dividents and sales.

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There's another approach you can try. It might have been easier if you had known to try it before you entered any Buy transactions, but it still could work.

I think if you enter the Buy transaction with a transaction date later than the placeholder, then Edit the Buy transaction to have the correct date, Quicken will not link the Buy to the placeholder.

In your case, you can try Editing the Buy dates so they are later than the placeholder date. If that removes the "N/A" and allows the Buy to alter the cash balance, then you can change the date back to the correct date.

Won't I end up with a Placeholder AND a Buy transaction?

"jo" wrote

Won't I end up with a Placeholder AND a Buy transaction?

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I assume so; but that doesn't mean there will be anything wrong.

Remember what the placeholder does. It just says: I own nnn shares of security xyz on date mm-dd-yy. If that is correct, there is nothing to worry about on the placeholder score.

Placeholders give some users problems; but usually it's because the user doesn't understand how placeholders work.

If you understand placeholders, and know yours are correct, I don't see much to worry about.

If you feel uncomfortable with placeholders ... take the "no placeholders in my file" approach I outlined earlier.

I went with the no-placeholders approach and am slowly entering the missing buys. I freely admit to being in the group of users who doesn't understand enough about the nuances of placeholders, and I don't have the luxury at the moment to experiment (limited hands-on- keyboard problems). I wish I could figure out the pattern of why transactions are being dropped so often, and it's almost exclusively with Buys of new securities.

Jo, I often end up with placeholders after updating with Vanguard. As near as I can tell, this happens when fractional shares are bought; then, Quicken gets how many shares are actually owned, and the fractional shares and the "actually owned" don't match up.

For example: Say there's a mutual fund reinvestment. Vanguard tells Quicken that 1.22334473 shares have been bought. Say that's now added to the previous 502.223 shares, and one ends up with 502.223 + 1.22334473 503.44634473 shares.

However, Vanguard then tells Quicken that it only has 503.446 shares in my account - and Quicken responds by putting up a placeholder! The amount in the placeholder is the difference between 503.446 and

Aggravating. The solution turns out to be a sequence more or less as follows:

1. Open up the placeholder.
2. Click on "resolve". It'll list all the transactions that add up to the total (given the example above, it would list 503.44634473) and the difference between what Quicken and your financial institution think you have. Click on the most recent transaction and edit same. Change the number of shares bought by the difference (it can be positive or negative, depending upon how Vanguard is doing the rounding), keep the total the same, and let the price be what it is (a lot of the time, the change in the number of shares is so small that Quicken doesn't change the price..) after the change. Save that transaction, it'll put you back in the placeholder, the missing shares (or too many) will go to zero, and when you exit the "fix placeholders" dialog, it'll disappear from the register.

YMMV.

Ken B.

Thanks for chiming in, Ken. My experience with Placeholders is that I only get them when Quicken and the update from my brokerage gets out of sync. It isn't fractional shares, it's entire buy transactions, as best as I can see. Quicken recognizes the new security but either doesn't see or isn't sent the approprite Buy transaction, so I have to make them manually if I want the portfolio tobalance with the brokerage account. It's easy to recognize when it happens because I do the comparison of holdings in the Online tab after an update and all the discrepancies show up. I only got into the Placehold discussion because I thought that it might faster if I allowed Quicken to add the bulk of the information. Normally there wouldn't be so many and I would fix the one or two dropped transactions, but this time I had moved into a new account and the manager sold and bought a lot of things to rebalance according to his strategy. Except for the problem of not deducting the transaction amount from my cash position, (which John has now explained to me), it would have worked. I gave up and deleted them all and just will slowly add the actual transactions into Quicken.

jo

re/"I often end up with placeholders after updating with Vanguard"...

I too use Vanguard for my investments, and have mutual funds, ETFs, and brokerage accounts (ind stocks) with them (mixture of Roth IRA, regular IRAs, and 'normal' taxable accounts). The point is I download a variety of accounts with them virtually daily, and of course with cap gains when I sell, reinvested dividends, and the like.

I NEVER have a problem with Vanguard and placeholders.

Are you sure you haven't done something in your Vanguard accounts that cause Quicken to think you've got a different balance that Vanguard has? I've never seen Vanguard (either in my own Quicken file or their myriad of statements I get) tell me I have more than 4 decimal places of shares (and for mutual funds, only 3 digits.)

Sounds to me (just my thought) that it isn't Vanguard that has a problem, but perhaps your Q data file?

Actually, I got of lot of the kinds of stuff that you list above. However, the one that gives me all the pain is a 401K plan of my wife's. As it happens, Vanguard keeps track of where all the contributions come from; so, when one does get a reinvestment, Vanguard splits the same reinvestment out up to four ways, depending upon the cash source: Company contribution, employee pretax contribution, employee aftertax contribution, and "Other Vesting". Not to mention "Unknown". If one looks at the possible cash sources on a transaction, there's like seven of them in there.

In any case, I got right here in front of me a reinvestment in a mutual fund, all on the same date: 16.470 shares from one cash source, 4.787 shares from a different cash source, and 0.281 in a third. What I find when all the dust settles is that Vanguard reports the holdings, based on cash source, for the three significant digits after the decimal point

- but the amounts in each transaction sometimes have values in the 10e-4 down to the 10e-6 positions. It's those values that get flagged with placeholders, every time.

So, I don't think it's my Quicken data file: It's been doing this for years!

Ken B.

Ah,ok Ken. I do say that a 401K is not one of my Vanguard accounts (Fidelity, in my case). So perhaps because of this, and the rather different handling you mentioned, this unfortunately manifests itself in your case.

replying to Ken, Skeleton wrote: I have used Quicken since 1986, and only once - EVER - did I download transactions from ANY institution. And that one time is a total disaster. I had a company 401k account that was turned over to Vanguard. I balanced out the company account manually and began the new Vanguard account entering transactions up to a point, reconciled, and both accounts were in perfect balance with complete correct history, perfect to number of shares, cost, and price history . After the new account (Vanguard) had been entered manually for a while, I did the Quicken download several times. From the start, the downloads began to create placeholder transactions. Now, years later, I am working on exporting my data to a 'real' relational database system, and the placeholder transactions are causing huge problems with the import process. Not sure why, but the attempt at downloading transactions taught me to never do it again. As to the placeholder transactions, the relative data is not presented intuitively. Quicken should NEVER, EVER do this. Just enter what it has and don't try to second-guess what is missing. Anybody smart enough to use Quicken should also be able to reconcile to a FI statement. Creating make-believe data in my files is a huge problem that I can reconcile myself. Now 15 years later I'm trying to go back and patch up their phony stuff so I have REAL data and therefore REAL INFORMATION. Am I upset? Yes.

I've used it about the same length of time.

I do it every day, from about a dozen different institutions. I've never had a single problem.

This is yet another reason why I do NOT download any data other than share prices. I'd rather manually input entries to my dozen accounts rather than face an eternity of corrections.

To that, I say, "Bullshit!"

And to your "bullshit" I say that I stopped a credit card fraud, and enable d the Police to arrest the perpetrators by downloading into Q and spotting a fraudulent transaction WEEKS before I would have been informed of the tra nsaction on my monthly statement.

So, your "bullshit" is nothing but the usual "night soil" that we've come t o expect from you.

Anyone less than ignorant, who has any credit card accounts, would REGULARLY check them online, rather than waiting for the monthly statement. Checking an account online is a lot faster AND easier AND safer than doing a download. Get a life!

I was simply relating my experience, which has been very different from yours. You think I'm lying? Feel free to believe whatever you want; it doesn't matter to me.

abled the Police to arrest the perpetrators by downloading into Q and spott ing a fraudulent transaction WEEKS before I would have been informed of the transaction on my monthly statement.

me to expect from you.

By what figment of your twisted imagination is checking 6 credit cards, fro m 5 different banks/logins, faster than a One Step Update that's unattende d? My computer does it automatically at 7am, 6 days a weeks.

And my life is, demonstrably, better than yours if all you can do is issue profanity and nonsense like you latest drivel.