recover old transaction from Fidelity account

[gbfabiani]

Hi Mark, Giovanni again.
i was showing my son the software so that he can later buy it and use use . He leaves in the US, so he can use the features to download transactions automatically from the different accounts.
He started with Fidelity, everything did work, he had all the stock positions imported, but transactions were imported only if not too old ( 7/10/2013 onwards). So most of his stocks got original value 0 , and of course all the calculations on yield become impossible ( but for the recently purchased ones)
So we tried to recover older data: he was extracting older transaction from Fidelity in CSV, he manually cleaned the different data to have a similar structure to the one Fundmanager has, and finally he tried to re-import them back into Fundmanger. Unfortunately the imported transactions didn't match with the ones directly imported (for instance the name was not identical) , and the software considered them different stocks , creating additional files .
Any suggestion how we can proceed ?? thanks giovanni

[Mark]

Hi Giovanni,

When you import from a CSV file, I assume you used the "File / Import / Transactions / Generic..." command? When you do this, the matching of incoming transactions with existing investments is done by matching the symbol property. This is specified with the SYMB keyword in your input format string for the import. Also, you can include the ACCT field in your CSV file if you have transactions in more than one account, and this will direct them to the sub-portfolio with a matching account number. If you only have transactions from a single account at a time, you don't have to include this field, and can just choose which sub-portfolio you want to import into on the import dialog.

[gbfabiani]

Hi Mark,

that what we have done. As the CSV file from Fidelity has a different structure, we used excel to identify the fields we need to import and their sequence in the string, recreating a new CSV file with the string . We tried with one account only. The SYMB and the ACCT were both correct ( so we feel) , but the system was not happy , and he create new files for each stock ( only the Cash account has not been re-created) .
Did we introduce a format issue because of excel ??
Any idea ??
thanks
giovanni

[Mark]

Hi giovanni,

It is fine to use Excel to clean up the data for importing. I do usually suggest that after you save from Excel to a CSV file you look at that file in Notepad prior to importing. Often times there are non-displayed characters in the CSV file you don't see in Excel, like double quotes, etc.

When you did the import, did these new investments get placed in the correct sub-portfolio? If so, then the problem isn't with the ACCT field, but the SYMB field. Take a look at the properties of the existing and new investments that should have been combined. Look at the symbol, and see if they are different. This can include white space (space character) too. This should help identify the problem. If both the ACCT and SYMB are matched exactly with existing investments, the importing transactions will go into those existing investments instead of new investments.