About placeholder entries
What is a placeholder entry?
Quicken enters a placeholder entry if you're missing part of your transaction history. For any given security, if the total number of shares bought or added in your transaction list doesn't equal the number of shares in your account, then Quicken enters a placeholder entry to make up the difference. Placeholder entries are shown in the Placeholder Entries section under the investment register of the account.
Placeholder entries can only occur in an investment transaction list. Each placeholder entry identifies the security name and number of shares added to or subtracted from the account (for example, 50 shares of Intuit). It does not include a purchase date or price, which Quicken needs to provide performance reporting or use tax planning tools. You need to resolve placeholder entries if you want to use these tools, but not if you want to track holdings-only information in Quicken.
How does Quicken know I am missing transactions?
Every time you download transactions from your brokerage or financial institution, Quicken also downloads holdings information for your account. For example, if your transaction list had 200 shares of Intuit, and you downloaded a buy transaction for 70 more, then in your transaction list the total number of shares of Intuit would be 270. But if during the same download your broker's records say you hold 300 shares of Intuit, then Quicken will add a placeholder to make up for the missing 30 shares.
When should I add missing transactions?
Because it doesn't represent an actual historical transaction, a placeholder entry identifies only the security name and number of shares added to or subtracted from the account (for example, 30 shares of Intuit). It doesn't include a purchase date or price, which Quicken needs in order to provide performance reporting or tax planning tools.
Enter the missing transaction history for a security if you want the additional benefits of performance monitoring, tax tracking, or historical record-keeping. When you enter the missing transactions, Quicken will subtract shares from the placeholder entry until they equal zero.
401(k) note
The first time you download transactions from your financial institution into a 401(k) account, Quicken uses special 401(k) placeholder entries to help account for employer and employee contributions. You don't need to edit these.
Why am I missing transactions?
Here are some scenarios where Quicken would add a placeholder entry to your transaction list:
When you add the account, you may have chosen to enter only holdings information.
You may have back-entered historical transactions for some (but not all) of the securities in an account.
You may have back-entered historical transactions for only a limited time period (for example, you may have entered just the past year's worth of historical transactions).
You may have started out with complete transaction history or cost basis information in the account, but you may have let a long time elapse between downloads. Financial institutions keep only a limited period of transaction history available for download. To avoid this, download regularly—at least once every three months.