The Lemon Fool

I use Money to monitor my portfolios.
I sold Standard Life Aberdeen a few months ago and it shows as zero shares in the various reports. However, I still get reminders to update the price. I suspect that due to the share splits and return of capital, there's a fragment of a share that's still there (but I can't see it as shares only appear as whole numbers).
Due to the share split, the investment record is actually showing fractions of shares in the quantity column for pre-split buys/sells (with an 's' next to the price), some of which go to 6 decimal places.

Is there any way to deal with this, e.g. by getting decimal places into the quantity column for account summary or investment transactions, so that I can change the final sell from a whole number to a whole number+a miniscule decimal amount?

Torata

Use a "Remove shares" transaction to get rid of the odd fraction. This will zero out the shareholding.

Alternatively create a sell for the share, (which will create a deposit in the cash account), and then make a balancing transaction in the cash account to zero out the cash account You'd probably have to create a new, meaningful, category.

Personally I would avoid "remove shares" as it smacks of a bodge.

The link below doesn't discuss exactly the same problem, but I think it might be similar enough for the steps taken to fix that problem to perhaps also help fix yours, or at least highlight some areas of the tool that you might not have investigated yet, which might be relevant to your own issue -

https://social.microsoft.com/Forums/Azure/en-US/48bfafdb-8aaa-41cd-96b1-ac76a43aea28/sold-stocks-and-mutual-funds-still-appear-in-investment-summery?forum=money

Cheers,

Itsallaguess

Thank you both. I haven't been able to solve it; but as IAAG says, I was able to investigate other areas that allowed me to be more sure of what's going on.
Anyway here's an update of what I did.

SLA shows as a closed position (i.e. it's greyed out in portfolio manager > change portfolio view > show closed positions) so that implies there's no fractional share hidden. So my initial assumption was wrong and it's something else going on.

Anyway I updated the price for this week so that's turned off the nagging - although possible only temporarily. (NB I manually update prices, and don't use any of the external fixes to auto-update).

I also removed the ticker, which was mentioned in a forum. Not sure if that will make any difference. It greys out 'quote detail' on a right click, but not 'update prices now' (which leads to an error message for all shares, closed or open, because it's the automatic update function which died many moons ago).

torata

This might be way off beam, but could the issue be a fractional purchase?

When entering a purchase transaction into financial software, three things are required. Price, cost and number of shares purchased (ignoring charges). Enter price and cost, and Money will calculate the number of shares. In this scenario, it might hold a fractional number but display a whole number.

I always enter cost and number of shares and let the program calculate the price.

If there are not too many purchase transations, it might be worth re-entering them in this way to remove the possibility of fractional shares arising.

staffordian wrote:This might be way off beam, but could the issue be a fractional purchase?

When entering a purchase transaction into financial software, three things are required. Price, cost and number of shares purchased (ignoring charges). Enter price and cost, and Money will calculate the number of shares. In this scenario, it might hold a fractional number but display a whole number.

I always enter cost and number of shares and let the program calculate the price.

If there are not too many purchase transations, it might be worth re-entering them in this way to remove the possibility of fractional shares arising.

Hello Staffordian

I think it's unlikely in this case (but happy to be proven wrong)
As a rule, for purchases, I enter the number of shares, their price, and add in the commission, checking that the money total cost matches the contract, so there's always a whole number of shares issued.
I have one Oeic, which I did the way you outline, which results in a fractional share (which doesn't show as fractional in the account register and reports, but I know it's there).

With the various share splits, it seems to be the (previous) prices only - both buy / sell price and weekly share prices - that have been adjusted, sometimes down to 6 decimal places.

Part of me thinks that 6 decimal places might be the Money max, but in fact it's actually more than that, or a recurring number somewhere, which might be why the issue is arising.
Or it might be that when the split was done, there was a a small amount of change that was left over and the broker kept it, and that's confused money.

While saying that I think your suggestion is unlikely, it has persuaded me to look at the actual figures and do them myself rather than let money work it out, in case there was some outstanding small change somewhere.

I'll update if I get anywhere.

torata