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Recurring investment transaction

I really did not think that this would be a hard transaction to set up in quicken but I cannot seem to get this to work. In the "real world" I have set up an automated payment to be sent from my bank to my brokerage company (Vanguard) to purchase shares in the Vanguard Prime Money Market fund. Thats it, sounds simple but I cannot figure out how to do that in quicken. Initally I tried setting up a recurring investment transaction but that only seemed to record the transaction in my checking account and would not show the purchase of shares in my investment account, in other words it was not a "double entry" accounting transaction. At first that bothered me but then I decided it would be better to let quicken download the transactions from vanguard, that way all the transactions would be entered automatically (my cash purchases, dividend reinvestments and maintenance fee withdrawals) after figuring that out I decided that I would let quicken download the transactions for the investment account. So all I would need to do is schedule a transaction to enter the transaction in my checking account, the two sides of the transaction would not be linked and any changes to one half of the transaction would not affect the other. I dont really like that but I can live with it. So I tried to create a scheduled recurring transaction to deduct $100/week from my checking account with a category of Buy Investment/CD. When I do that it appears that quicken requires a class to be assigned to that transaction, so I created class Vanguard Money Market. Doing that worked fine for the first transaction but the second time I enter that same transaction I get a warning that the class name Vanguard Money Maket is already used and that I will need to pick a different class name. So does that mean that I need to create a new class for every one of these transactions? So if this scheduled transaction recurs every week then after one year I will have

52 classes just for this transaction. That makes no sense.

So here is what I am trying to do: I want a scheduled recurring transaction to deduct $100/week from my checking account, I know how to do this but my problem appears to be what category/class to use because Buy Investment/CD does not appear to work the way I would expect.

Any advice on how to set up this scenerio in quicken? I am open to any suggestions, even if it is different than what I have said above.

Thanks, Sam

Reply to
Sam
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you need to schedule a group of two transactions, the first moving money from checking to broker account; the second using that money in the broker account to buy the shares. Search for help on "group" scheduling, or some such thing.

Reply to
123go

Thanks for the response, I think I have it figured out now. Partially by doing what you had said (which is what I had tried one before) but this time I saw that there is another "action" I had not seen before, BoughtX. Using BoughtX (shares bought from transfer) will enter both sides of the transaction with a single transaction.

The other problem I was having also seems to have been fixed but I am not sure why. It appears that when using the Buy Investment/CD category a class is not required with the recurring transaction but when I try to use that same category with a manual transaction I am prompted to enter a Class, not only that but I am prompted to enter a new class for every transaction that uses that category. Stange how a class is not required if the transaction is scheduled.

Thanks again for the help

123go wrote:
Reply to
Sam

Can you safely use a category name that includes a forward slash, ie, "Buy Investment/CD"? Wouldn't that signify a class named "CD" for the "Buy Investment" category?

David P.

Reply to
David Parker

David, I thought the same thing. Part of my problem is that I converted my data file from money and I am not sure which categories are from money and which are from quicken. I am assuming now that Buy Investment/CD is a category that come from money. I want to go though my register and change the category for all my investment transactions to the proper category. Part of my original question was what category should I use when purchasing stock, I have not received a straight forward answer to that question. Do you know what category should be used when purchasing stock?

Thanks, Sam

Reply to
Sam

"Sam" wrote

You can't have a Quicken category with a forward slash ("/") in its name. When Quicken sees the forward slash it assumes that what follows is a "Class"; if the class does not already exist in Quicken, Quicken will drop you into the routine to create it. You are not required to put a class on any transaction.

There is no category for investment account "Buy - Shares bought" transactions.

The only time you should see data in the category field of a security purchase transaction is if you enter a transaction that transfers cash into the investment account and buys shares of a security all in one transaction. In that case, you will see an "account category" (the name of the Quicken account that supplied the funds ... in square brackets) in the category field, placed there by Quicken (such a transaction will have an "Action" value of "BoughtX" instead of "Bought").

Reply to
John Pollard

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