American Century Funds

[belswick]

New user, failing on my first outing
Trying to get transactions from American _Century_ Funds. I found a setting for "American Century Investments" in Transaction Retrieve Settings, put my username and password in the boxes, but have nothing to put in the account number. American Century does not have an account number for my account, instead they have a separate account number per fund that I own. So I tried putting in one of the fund account numbers. This did not work, but I got an error message stating that my "Tax Identification Number must be numeric and nine digits in length. Aha, I thought, I'll use my SSN as my account number. Unfortunately, entering my valid SSN produces the same error message. So I have to conclude that the error message is incorrect. That leaves me back at square one: I need to figure out what needs to go in the Account Number field for American Century Investments. I see no tips on the "already supported list", so I'm lost.
Thanks in advance for any help or suggestions.

[Mark]

Hello belswick,

It sounds like you're not getting to the part where the account number is used. First, the User ID and password must be accepted. If you get logged in okay, Fund Manager will show you a list of all available account numbers if yours doesn't exactly match one of the available accounts under this User ID/password.

We don't have any specific instructions for "American Century Investments", but there is also an "American Funds" that we support. Maybe you need to use this server? There are some special instructions for retrieving from this server. You need to use <fundnumber>,<accountnumber> as the "User ID". If this doesn't solve the problem, please visit the mutual fund company's website, and see if they can offer you any instructions on what to enter. If you find instructions for retrieving into MS Money, you can use these similar instructions in Fund Manager. They both work the same when retrieving transactions and positions.

[belswick]

I learned some things by experimenting and looking around on the AmCen site. I managed to get some historical transaction data, but not much.

First, your User ID is not your web user id. It is your SSN.
Second, your Password is not your password at all. Instead, it is your "Personal Access Code (PAC/PIN)". You can find this by looking for a link on the "Configure Quicken" page on the AmCen site.

When setting up to retrieve transactions on AmCen, do not enter an account number for the portfolio. You have to enter these separately for each mutual fund after the investment is created, or can pick from a list once you are connected and let the program create the investments. Every time you create an investment, you have to go back and *remove* the account number from the Transaction Retrieve Settings" dialog - clear the box to blank or you will not be able to select the next fund from the list.

The bad news is that the information available from the AmCen site only goes back to about 12/31/2004, so for long term account holders, this does not do you much good. It also does not retrieve the initial value of the account unless it was opened recently, so the account values you get back are wrong for accounts that have existed for more than a couple of years.

Also, funds that you have sold still appear and generate transactions, so since initial price is not available, you will find that you appear to be "short" funds that you have sold. Pretty cool, I didn't know that you could short no-load mutual funds...

[Mark]

Hello belswick,

Thanks for sharing your learnings on the userid/password. Was this for the "American Century Investments" or did you end up using "American Funds"?

It does seem that several mutual fund companies organize their OFX servers so there is one 'account' per fund. In these cases, I'd suggest creating a sub-portfolio for each mutual fund. This way, you can keep the account number assigned, without changing it for each retrieve. For example, you could have a sub-portfolio "American Century", and then multiple sub-portfolios under that one, one sub-portfolio per fund.

It is quite common that data on the OFX servers only goes back a limited amount of time. In these cases, you would want to either enter/import all your data prior to this, or manually enter a single buy transaction for the amount of shares (and cost basis) as of the beginning of the retrieved period. This will correct your share balances. This issue is discussed briefly in the "Getting Started" tutorial. It says:

One common problem for an initially incorrect share balance can occur when the transaction retrieval did not provide all the historical transactions back to the inception of your account. Some brokers/mutual fund companies only provide transactions back to a certain date. If this is the case, your share balances will be off by the amount of shares you owned on that date. You can either record a single purchase on that date for the missing shares, or you can manually record (or import) all the transactions from inception up to that date.