automatic mutual funds purchase

Yes and yes, assuming your FI (Financial Institution) can download transactions.

You can automatically transfer a certain amount of cash from one account (checking or savings, perhaps?) into a brokrage account and Q will (assuming this is where your FI gets the money) automatically (or with a simply edit of the downloaded transactions) take the cash balance from your account and apply it to whatever stocks you purchase.

Dividends and redistributions can automatically be downloaded as well, again assuming the FI supports it. There's a list available when you set up your account and enable it for ONLINE ACCESS that you'll be able to scroll through to pick from.

Hi Andrew,

Thank you for your reply.

Unfortunately my FI does not have any online support. Quicken knows nothing about this FI.

The cash transfer is fine since I have good support for my checking account. My problem is how to translate this cash transfer into mutual funds without need to lookup the fund prices for that day.

So, if I understand you correct, as long as my FI does not allow me any downloading, I'll have to do it all bymyself, right?

Thanks.

-- Michael

Once you enter your first transaction with a fund, it will update prices when you run the "One-Step Update" if you select the option to have Q download prices and asset class info. Then when you enter a buy/sell, the current price should be there for you.

I doubt that you will be able to get this to do all the work for you, there are too many variables involved, but you may be able to automate some of the process.

If you buy the same 8 securities and pay the same amount for each every two weeks, you can "memorize" the 8 buy transactions and create a "scheduled" *group* transaction to enter them into the investment account every two weeks. If I recall correctly, when those scheduled memorized transactions are entered into the investment account, they will use the most current price/share; you will be responsible for insuring that the "current" price is the price at which the actual transactions take place.

Even if you get that price/share correct, you will have to contend with possible rounding differences; those diferences can cause Quicken to buy an incorrect number of shares. In which case you would have to modify the Buy transactions to buy the exact number of shares at the exact amount paid, and allow Quicken to compute the price/share. Still you may find the process less work than what you do now.

No, Quicken can not do this automatically.

To the extent that you could reasonably predict the date and type of the reinvestment, you could handle this in a similar manner to the above approach, except you would be guaranteed to have to modify the resulting transactions since the amount of the dividend will not be the same every time.

Hi,

I would like to thank everyone for your answers.

I'll try to follow John's suggestion.

Thanks again.

-- Michael

Plan entering the number of shares every time and let it calculate the price. Rounding will cause you never to have the exact amount of shares correct! I found memorizing the transaction with just the cost (before you hit enter) is best, before the price and share amounts are entered. At least that work best for q2003/2004. Fortunately, all my FI, including my