Validation error: incorrect backfilled investment cash transactions

"vodil" wrote

I believe you get backfilled cash adjustments when you enter an investment transaction controlled by a placeholder, in an investment account with a linked checking account.

Transactions controlled by placeholders are not allowed to alter the cash balance of the investment account. When there is no linked checking account, such transactions get "N/A" in the "Cash Amt" column. But where there is a linked checking account, there is no cash amount in the investment account ... it's all in the linked checking account. In such cases, Quicken creates an offset to the transfer of cash to the linked checking account. So you could see a Div transaction (for example) followed immediately by an XOut (balancing cash adjustment) transaction for the negative amount of the dividend - effectively causing no change to the cash balance.

If you have told Quicken to show "hidden" investment transactions*, placeholders and backfilled cash adjustments should be visible in the investment account registers. You should also be able to see them in the Investment Transactions and Banking Transactions reports.

I don't use linked checking accounts but I do have dozens maybe hundreds of zero-share Placeholders. They don't look bad. I don't seem to have any way of indentifying the one Quicken does not like...it is rather annoying Validate does not identify it. I don't see anything that is identified as a backfilled transaction. Is there a way to search for them?

"vodil" wrote

I now notice them in other investment account types ... where I didn't think they would be. My mistake.

I don't know what Validate considers bad, but I'm pretty sure the number of shares adjusted by the placeholder isn't material.

I don't know any way to identify one that Validate doesn't like.

The transactions show up in the Banking > Transactions report.

Look for "Balancing Cash Adjustment" in the memo or description field.

Thanks John. No transactions showed up in the banking transactions report; so I gave up and figured it was all OK.

FYI, One of the reasons to Validate was to make sure anything fixable was fixed before upgrading to 2011. I just did the upgrade and it went fine. I ran Validate on 2011 and it found and FIXED 4 placeholder transactions...so whatever it was got fixed. It did not tell me which ones, but so far I have not seen any problems. It also corrected a bunch of other transactions--hopefully correctly. The 2011 Validate seems somewhat better in that regard.