Investment Account Reconcile

If you have a checking (or money market) account linked to an investment account, then any cash should automatically be transferred into the checking account, and that is the one you reconcile.

Otherwise the cash stays in the investment account and you can reconcile that.

Some brokerages insist on downloading purchases and sales of the account's money market fund just like any other security. This makes it kind of useless to reconcile the cash account since there is no cash in it.

What I do with those accounts is to (1) delete the m>I've spent a little time searching old entries and it seems like a

I just opened five Vanguard money market accounts for the kids. I thought it might be easier to download info rather than enter manual dividend payments, infrequent deposits, and infrequent withdraws like I've been doing for my single account. With my manual method for a single account, I had three scheduled entries every quarter for the money dividends which wasn't too bad. I'm beginning to wonder if downloading is really going to save me any time.

Anyone care to list the pros and cons of downloading six Vanguard money market accounts?

Tim Updegrove

Tim Updegrove

So it sounds like you have five investment accounts in Quicken, one for each Vanguard account, and each one has a linked cash account. The only security in each investment account would be shares of the same Vanguard money market fund.

I'd suggest that you eliminate the linked cash account, since it never has any cash. For the infrequent deposits and withdrawals you would have to enter two transactions, a buy/sell and one to handle the cash.

It's up to you to decide whether it's more work to enter the deposits/withdrawals by hand, or the quarterly dividends.

The advantage of downloading the transactions is that they will be accurate, and you can get an automatic check on the account balance.

"I'm beginning to wonder if downloading is really going to save me any time. "

What makes you think it won't save time? Vanguard money market funds download transfers, new investments, dividend investments etc. just fine. It's easiest if you don't have a linked cash account and say no to "Single Mutual Fund?" That allows you to have cash in the account.

Yes, I do have six investment accounts in Quicken without linked cash accounts, Single Mutual Fund is set to no, and there is a single money market security in each account. Unfortunately, Vanguard records the money market money in the investment account and not in the cash account.

What exactly do you mean above?

In a separate topic, Alan has responded, "What I do, after having this discussion years ago with Vanguard, is to have a separate mm account which is a dummy account - i used it for recording checks out of mm fund and deposits into mm fund, but the balance is always set to zero, by transfering money to and from the vanguard inv estmentaccount. in my case this dummy account is linked as a c ash account to vanguard brokerage account - and interest from bonds is automatically transferred into the mm dummy, and then i manually transfer it back to vanguard investment ccount -again to make the balance zero. while this might seem awkward, it works fine. "

So for a downloaded sell transaction (Ex. a money market check was written), here is what I think needs to be done. (1) Create a dummy account, (2) under "record proceeds?" change it from cash balance to this dummy account (positive balance), and (3) then create a "pay" transaction in this account to bring the balance back to zero. Agree? (I'd need six dummy accounts in my case, argh.)

Tim Updegrove