Cash accounts in investments

David:

I'm not following what you want here. If you have a cash position in some of your investment accounts, (a "sweep" feature in a brokerage account, for example), it seems like you'd want the cash to be included in Quicken, whether you download transactions or not, just to be able to balance to the broker's monthly statement. Entering buys and sells manually doesn't affect this: your manual entry of a buy, for example, would reduce cash in the account, exactly duplicating what you'd see in the broker's statement that included this transaction.

The fact that you say that when you *do* manually enter a transaction you "have to keep zeroing out the cash" suggests to me that your investment accounts might have an associated checking account that gets automatically increased when you sell a security and automatically reduced when you buy a security. If that's the case then you'd follow up any "buy" or "sell" with a transfer of cash from or to the associated checking account, or just do a "BoughtX" or "SoldX" transaction with the checking account being the source or recipient of cash. (If using the Buy or Sell wizards you'd indicate cash is coming from or being deposited to the associated bank account.)

Tom Young

I had to do that too when I converted. If I remember right, in the account list, right click on your investment account and select Edit Account.

On the Account Details -> General tab, there should be a "Show cash in a checking account". Change that to No.

Bruce.

Here's a somewhat different spin. I have a brokerage account in Vanguard; their 'sweep' account is in a money market fund account, both have different account numbers. The difference is that the sweep is not in a bank account, it's in the same FI as the stock account, just a different type with a different account number. But Tom's thoughts are exactly correct; when a buy or sell is executed, we use a BOUGHTX or SOLDX to increase or decrease the number of shares in the money market sweep account to cover the cost or increase the balance of the sale .

A question that you need to answer David is when you purchase in your brokerage account, where's the money *coming* from??

A couple more points. I have unchecked the "show cash" in the brokerage account but that did not eliminate the cash account. The money for a buy is coming from a money market security in the same brokerage account. When I manually enter a buy or sell, I also manually update the MM balance as well. Part of the problem is historical in that the MM account since the beginning has been set up to contain one share, and I just update the share price to reflect the total value. Maybe it is time to rethink how I approach this with Quicken. In MS Money, I just was able to avoid using a cash account completely.

David

Since the share price for money market securities within the brokerage account typically don't fluctuate the easiest way to account for the security is *not* to account for the security at all. That is, the money market security is just carried as "cash" within the account.

In the case of my various Schwab accounts where idle cash is swept into the "Schwab Cash Reserves Sweep Fund" Schwab adds dollars in this Fund to "real" cash in the account and provides a "Total Cash and Cash Investments" figure. As long as that total is the same as the cash I show in Quicken I know that I've done my accounting properly.

Tom Young

Odd. They must have somehow gotten unlinked. I just changed mine to Yes and it created the cash account, then changed it back to No and it deleted the cash account.

Bruce.