reconciling when transactions are pending

[JeanneMarie]

I sold four positions late yesterday (Friday). Merrill Lynch shows these positions with zero shares and shows the exact $ pending settlement. So when I tried to reconcile that account, I had a discrepancy for each sold security; FM has shares that ML says are gone.

After adjusting a separate, unrelated position, I just canceled the reconciliation without touching the four securities sold. I figured I should wait until the actual sales can be downloaded and all will then even out.

Just wondering whether there's something/anything I should do differently.

Thanks.

[Mark]

Hi JeanneMarie,

It sounds like you haven't recorded the sell transactions yet? Once you do so, it sounds like you will reconcile. If you've retrieved transactions, but they aren't available yet, then you might just want to wait until the broker provides the transactions. Alternatively, you can manually record the transactions if you'd like, and not wait for the broker.

[JeanneMarie]

You are correct. I did not record the sales manually in FM.

This is really a bit of a false alarm. I don't buy and sell that much and I'm not into FM every day. Actually, what purchases and sales I do are usually after a session with FM, and then I don't open it for awhile. So I now realize that I generally have just seen them pop up when I've retrieved transactions.

Now, atypically, uncharacteristically, I was in there the following morning and faced with something I wasn't used to seeing. I understand the situation completely; I'm just too easily startled.

Anyway, you sound like either way is fine. There's no compelling reason to do one or the other. It's about my own workflow. (And even if FM duplicated a transaction for some reason, it would be easy enough to delete any redundancy. It's not that I need to trawl through an enormous number of transactions seeking to reconcile.)

Thanks for your patience.