Fidelity sweep fund annoyance

I have experienced an issue with syncing Quicken Windows to Fidelity accounts. This has been happening for many years, with all of my Fidelity accounts.

The syncing process duly reports dividends paid by the sweep (money market) mutual fund. But it does not report the purchase of new fund shares with those dividends. Hence,

Reality: number of shares of sweep fund in Fidelity account increases.

Quicken register: number of shares of sweep mutual fund is unchanged. A cash balance appears.

My work-around is to manually add a buy transaction to the Quicken register. Is there a better solution?

Reply to
David Arnstein
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Unfortunately, I think you are mostly at the mercy of your financial institution: if they do not download all the legitimate MM transactions, there's nothing Quicken can do.

If your problem is limited to missing the MM Buy transaction that should remove the cash generated by the MM Dividend transaction; the only alternative I can suggest would be to Edit the downloaded Dividend transaction to be a Reinvest Dividend transaction ... I think that would be slightly less work than creating a new Buy transaction. [I'm assuming that all the real-world Div/Buy pairs occur on the same date.]

Reply to
John Pollard

I did not think of this earlier; perhaps it could be another alternative.

I have a Fidelity account; but I currently have no MM fund there, so I can't test this.

There is an option at Fidelity for how to handle "Dividends and Capital Gains".

For both Dividends and Capital Gains: you can choose to have dividends reinvested, or deposited to your Fidelity "Core Account".

And, as I understand it, you can choose to have your Fidelity Core Account be a MM fund or cash.

If you were to change your Fidelity Core Account to Cash, you might be able to keep your Quicken holdings in sync with your Fidelity holdings without having to add or edit any downloaded transactions. I'm presuming here that if your Fidelity Core Account is cash, Fidelity would be downloading interest transactions (instead of Dividend transactions), which would not require any additional processing: they would increase your Quicken cash keeping it in sync with your Fidelity cash.

Reply to
John Pollard

I have another approach (with two variations), if you prefer.

VARIATION 1

You can utilize a Quicken "Scheduled Transaction Group" to enter both the Dividend and Buy transactions simultaneously in your Quicken Fidelity account; then have the downloaded transactions match the ones you entered via the Schedule Transaction Group.

For this approach to work; you should NOT use the Quicken Preference to "Automatically add ...." investment transactions to your Fidelity account.

[Since you probably won't know the exact amount of the dividend before the download, this approach will require you to modify the amount of a dividend and a buy transaction in the Quicken Fidelity account before Accepting the downloaded dividend and buy transactions.]

- Create a dividend transaction and a bought transaction for the MM fund in your Quicken Fidelity account.

- Right-click each transaction and choose to "Memorize investment transaction". When that is done, you can see the memorized dividend and bought transactions by going to Investing > Memorized Investment Transactions.

- Create a Quicken "Scheduled Transaction Group" by:

-- going to Tools > Manage Bill & Income Reminders,

-- clicking Add and selecting "Scheduled Transaction Group".

-- Give the Scheduled Transaction Group a name, assign it to the Fidelity brokerage account, chose a "Due on" date and a Frequency

-- Where the dialog says "Choose Transactions", select "Investment"

-- You should see then see the memorized dividend and bought transactions displayed with an empty check box (in the column, "Group"): put a check mark in the box for each

-- Click Save.

- Delete the dividend and buy transactions from the Fidelity account.

Make sure you Enter the Scheduled Transaction Group in your Fidelity account (anytime) before Accepting the downloaded Fidelity transactions. When the downloaded transactions are visible in the Downloaded Transactions tab, you can edit the existing dividend and buy transactions for the correct amount. [If you know the amount of the dividend before the download, you can modify the dividend/buy transactions at that time.]

Your downloaded transactions should then have a Status of "Near Match", and they should be matches to the two transactions you entered via the Scheduled Transaction Group then modified to have the correct amount.

------------------------------------------------------------------ VARIATION 2

There is another way you can use Memorized Investment transactions for your purpose. With the Memorized Investment Transaction list open and an appropriate Quicken investment account open, you can select a Memorized Investment Transaction (in the List) and click the "Use" button. That process will allow you to modify the Memorized Investment Transaction (just as if you had selected the transaction in a Quicken account, and clicked its Edit button), before letting the "Use" process Enter the transaction.

Reply to
John Pollard

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