I'm setting up my 401k in Moneydance. My provider (Wells Fargo Retirement Services) doesn't offer direct connect, so I downloaded all available transactions (last two years) as .qfx files, then imported them.

Summary of what follows: I have some dummy transfers in the import that are apparently linked to my checking account, and don't know what they are or what to do with them. And I have a large negative 401k cash balance that should not be there. I've done my homework on the latter issue but come up with only very awkward workarounds.

I had the following issues after import:

1. Some current share holdings (under portfolio view) were incorrect. This appears to be because the available history doesn't go back to the beginning of time. I sort-of-fixed it by creating fictitious buyxfr transactions for each erroneous security, transferring from an Income:Initial Holdings category, with the date and price of the oldest available transaction. The result appears acceptable at first glance.

2. In trying to get a handle on how investment transactions are laid out, I noted several values in the Description field. Some are obvious (Contributions, Earnings, Recordkeeping Fees), but there's a set that confuses the heck out of me with a Description field of "Transfer". These transactions happen a few times a year, in batches. They appear as buyxfr/sellxfr actions, transfered to/from my checking account (some default?), and add or remove some number of shares with a "Price" of exactly 100, but an "Amount" of exactly 0. I think they have something to do with investment rebalancing, but I'm not sure.

I am not sure what they are so I'm not sure what to do with them. They certainly have no business being listed in my checking account, though, and I don't see an obvious way to move the "other end" someplace else. The dummy price value mucks up graphs badly, so I don't want to leave them alone.

1. The account's cash balance shows as negative. As far as I can tell from searching the forums here, this is because all transactions are listed as Buy/Sell (with the value of the transaction taken from the cash balance).

Issue #1 isn't really a problem; I fixed it once and now I'm done. Issue #2 is confusing and the blips in the price history are annoying. Issue #3 messes up lots of stuff, mainly in the investment account summary and in net worth calculations. There's been a lot of discussion of the problem in other threads. I gather that my transaction history is "supposed to" separate my payroll contributions (as cash transfers) from share purchases (as buys). Unfortunately my provider does not do this.

Ideally I would like my 401k's "cash balance" to be always treated as zero, since it's irrelevant to anything in this context. After digging through the manual and the discussion history here, I've found a few potential workarounds:

1. Manually go through my past and future paychecks, see how much was contributed, and create Xfr transactions for them. I won't do this. The whole point of MD to me is to minimize the work involved in tracking my finances. Every manual transaction is a bug in my process.

2. Add an Xfr from a dummy category (or change the account's initial balance) whenever I notice the cash balance out of whack. Simple, but can't be automated and causes badly misleading graphs.

3. Reclassify all Buy/Sell transactions as BuyXfr/SellXfr, with a dummy category as the transfer account. This seems like the best solution. Unfortunately I can't do this with either the batch-change tool or the find/replace extension (they don't offer an option for working on either the Action field or the Transfer field), and I'm certainly not doing it by hand for two years of data.

So yeah. Pardon the wall of text. What's the appropriate way to deal with these problems? My aim here is "fix it once, then never again." If that means I have to write a script to process the qfx files before importing them, I can do that, if I know how they need to be changed.