Vanguard Account Numbers

[jmehling]

I have an investment in a Vanguard mutual fund and also a Vanguard IRA account that contains several other Vanguard mutual funds. The Vanguard account number is the same for the taxable account and the IRA account except each investment has a different prefix denoting the Vanguard Fund. I transferred my records from Quicken (where I had each mutual fund in a separate account, i.e. 3 accounts for the 3 mutual funds in the Vanguard IRA). The Vanguard website lists the 2 accounts and shows the IRA containing the 3 mutual funds.

After transferring the records from Quicken I tried to update transactions from Vanguard. The import screen for the taxable account has all of the transaction history for the IRA account and vice versa. I can't figure out how to tell FM or Vanguard to reverse the situation. I tried to rename the sub-portfolios in FM to match exactly the Vanguard portfolios, tried to use names that made the portfolios in FM be in the same order as they appear on the Vanguard website, etc. Nothing seems to work.

I am using a hierarchy of "Vanguard Accounts" with no investments, and sub-portfolios of "IRA-Rollover" and "Municipal Bonds" which contain 3 mutual fund investments in the IRA Rollover and the Vanguard muni bond fund and muni money market fund in the "Municipal Bonds" sub-portfolio.

[Mark]

Hi jmehling,

When retrieving transactions the sub-portfolio account number is what is used for requesting transactions. You can edit the account number by right mouse clicking on the sub-portfolio in the Portfolio Editor window. This will bring up the "Portfolio Properties" dialog.

If I understand right, it sounds like you just need to swap the account numbers on these 2 sub-portfolios.

Another technique you can use is to erase the account numbers prior to retrieving a sub-portfolio. When first connecting to Vanguard, Fund Manager gets a list of all the available account numbers for your login username/password and gives you the choice of which account number you want to use for this sub-portfolio.

[jmehling]

I removed the Vanguard account numbers from the sub-portfolios, and as you predicted I now get a screen listing all of the Vanguard account numbers keyed to my login. The problem is that 2 IRA accounts and a taxable account all have the same account number, but they have different mutual funds in them. On the Vanguard website, the 3 accounts all appear OK as 3 distinct accounts. When I command a transaction retrieve in a sub-portfolio in FM, the window opens with all of my Vanguard account numbers, but when I select the account number that is being used for the 3 accounts I get a different list of transactions for each of the 3 sub-portfolios. However, in each case the transaction list contains an overlap of the securities in the other accounts, but not the securities in the sub-portfolio selected. So, somehow it looks like either FM or Vanguard is sending/receiving additional information that is causing Vanguard to transmit transactions from combinations of the different accounts.

Is there a logfile I could look at to see exactly what is being transmitted/received in ASCII? There must be something behind the scenes that is causing this problem. Somehow Vanguard is able to keep the taxable account, the IRA account and the IRA Rollover account records separate from each other.

FYI - in Quicken, I used a different Quicken account for each mutual fund investment. In the case of the IRA account that has 3 different Vanguard mutual funds I had 3 Quicken investment accounts that I just called IRA1, IRA2, etc.

[Mark]

Hi jmehling,

So when you are presented with a list of all your accounts, you only see this one account number once, for all 3 of these accounts in question? It sounds like this is the case. It seems odd to have the same account number for 3 different accounts...

It sounds like you may have the option to "Skip transactions already in Fund Manager" turned on. This is the default. When you retrieve, you're only seeing the transactions from the other 2 accounts, because you already have the transactions recorded for this account, so they aren't listed in the Preview dialog. Could this be what is happening?

You can either create one sub-portfolio to track all of these 3 accounts together, or you can have 3 separate sub-portfolios, each with the same account number. You can have multiple sub-portfolios with the same account number. If you choose the 3 sub-portfolio method, you would want to retrieve with the option to "Create New Investments As Needed" turned off, so that only existing investments in each of your sub-portfolios will be updated, and FM will ignore transactions for investments that aren't already existing in your sub-portfolio. If you happen to own the same mutual fund in each of these 3 different accounts, then this won't work, as there would be no way to differentiate which account this mutual fund belongs to.

Yes, there are log files you can look at. Please read the bottom of this page for details:

http://www.fundmanagersoftware.com/tintrtv.html