I have recently installed Quicken 2005 Deluxe following the sunset of Quicken 2001 by Intuit. My computer is running Windows XP Pro and I have completely separate programs running for my wife and myself. Everything now seems in order on both programs except for the Charles Schwab account on my program which is not downloading the simple interest on my cash. It is correctly downloading transactions and dividend interest on my Schwab money market account, but the interest on the cash in this account does not show up. The account itself displays in two places: the cash in the cash flow section and the money market account in the investing center. The money market balance in the investing center is accurate, but the cash in the cash flow section does not match my statement, not surprising since it does not reflect any of the cash interest.
My wife has the same type of account with Schwab but her Quicken program displays the Schwab account only in the investing center and shows all of her dividends from the money market account and her cash and cash interest in this one place. Her balances and downloads are accurate.
My question, of course, is what do I do? I will be perfectly happy to have the entire Schwab account in one place, just like my wife's, but I do need it to balance and show the cash interest.
It sounds to me like your Quicken file has the Charles Schwab account defined with a "linked cash account" while your wife's file does not. In earlier versions of Quicken, it was necessary to have a linked cash account if you wanted to handle check writing as you would in a checking account; but that linked cash account is no longer necessary as newer versions of Quicken will maintain check info right in the investment account.
I never use linked cash accounts myself so I have no direct experience with downloading transactions to them. But in some limited testing I did I think it is possible that if Schwab is downloading an IntInc (Interest Income) transaction to report the interest on your cash balance, that transaction may not be processed correctly by Quicken. Since an investment account with a linked cash account can not carry a cash balance, any transactions that would normally result in a cash balance must become "transfer" type transactions; transferring the cash to or from the linked cash account. In the case of interest income, that "action" code should be "IntIncX" ... but Schwab probably does not know that, and in any event, I think that Quicken should probabably just convert any incoming IntInc transaction to an IntIncX transaction, but in my tests, Quicken does not seem to do that.
In my test (which may not be reliable since I did not test with a true download), when I "imported" an IntInc transaction into an investment account with a linked cash account, the transaction itself never appeared anywhere in Quicken ... but it did not totally escape notice by Quicken either. On the "Summary" tab of the investment account, the amount of the IntInc transaction was shown in the "Account Status" "Cash Balance". This situation should never occur as far as I can tell; the cash balance should only appear in the linked cash account (and there is a separate value on the Summary tab of the investment account for the linked cash balance ... it shows zero because no transfer transaction ever made its way into Quicken).
If my tests duplicate your experience, and Schwab can not or will not download an IntIncX transaction (and I am not sure they should), I think you may want to reconsider maintaining a separate linked cash account. Since you can now write checks directly from your investment account, the linked cash account should not be necessary. (Though I do remember reading at least one post from someone who may have found some other problem with writing checks directly from an investment account ... I can't remember what that problem was).
You can convert an investment account so it does not have a linked cash account: on the Summary tab, in the Account Attributes box, click "Edit Account Details" then click the "No" radio button for "Show cash in checking account". Quicken will want to do a backup before it starts the process, just tell it where to put the backup file.
Thanks very much for your reply, John. I think you have found the problem, since the cash balance in the Schwab account in Quicken is considerably higher than that shown on my paper statement and there are a number of corrections, placeholders, etc.
I have converted the Schwab account so that it matches that of my wife and no longer have a separate linked cash account. However, the interest payments still do not show up. Is there a way of deleting the entire Schwab account and then downloading this account from scratch? I think there are about 18 months worth of statements that Schwab keeps online and this would be sufficient for me - I do not need the older tansactions for historical puposes. Hopefully, the new download would contain the interest items and give a correct balance.
I did not mean to suggest that converting the account to no longer have a linked cash account would recapture your missing transactions; sorry if you thought that.
Yes you could delete the account and set it up again, and yes you could get all the history that Schwab will provide - deleting an account and all its transactions in Quicken is quite easy - but before doing so, you should give it serious thought. I have no idea what kind of history you have there, so I can't say whether that would be a good idea or not. But if you are willing to give up the history of your security purchases/sales, I don't see why you wouldn't be even more willing to give up the history of your interest income on your cash balance: it certainly has less importance than the security transactions.
If you have printed, or online, statements for recent periods, you can determine the interest you were paid and enter you own IntInc transactions for those periods. Once you get to the point - in the past - where you have no more statements, or you no longer care about the historical accuracy of the account, you can enter one final adjusting entry to make your current cash balance correct. You can identify any "adjusting" entry by noting something in the memo field, and/or you can use a MiscInc entry to enter the amount.
Personally, I would be unwilling to lose any of the history of my security transactions if I could possibly avoid it.
(You mention having "corrections" and "placeholders": I don't know about the "corrections", but I would endeavor to avoid the placeholders if I could. Placeholders are created when an "Adjust Share Balance" transaction is entered (by you, your fi, or by Quicken in response to your answer to a question). Unless you are very comfortable with placeholders, I would try to avoid them: you can use "Add Shares" or "Remove Shares", for example, to "adjust" share balances. Better yet, you can get the real-world history and enter the actual Buys/Reinvestments/Sells, etc.).
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