Vanguard Setup

How should a Vanguard Money Market account be setup in Quicken 2006 Deluxe? This may not be right but currently I have a linked checking account with all the money in the "cash" account and nothing in the investment account.

I've been manually updating this cash account for the dividend re-investment every quarter (three entries, one per month). I'd like to switch to downloading transactions. I tried two different methods but both have problems.

(1) Enabled online transactions for the Vanguard investment account (it wouldn't let me enable them for the cash account). However, every transaction since Aug 2004 was automatically downloaded into the investment account (and apparently, an "accept all" must be automatically performed when the account name is clicked). The investment account has the correct balance but the cash account has a bunch of "deposit" and "withdraw" transactions for shares bought/sold in the investment account. I suspect the problems here are due to the account being setup and/or managed wrong (see my first paragraph).

(2) Ignored the existing Vanguard cash and investment accounts in Quicken and created a new Vanguard account, with the idea to delete the old Vanguard cash/investment accounts. Used online setup so a single account was created in the Investment Center and, like before, transactions from Aug 2004 were automatically downloaded (and apparently, an "accept all" must be automatically performed when the account name is clicked). For this method, how do I handle deposits made in the past to the Vanguard account via a physical check from a local bank? That is, the local checking account has a reconciled transaction already. I'm worried about messing up the local checking account (when deleting the old two Vanguard accounts) which has been reconciled.

This probably isn't too clear yet you probably get the idea of what I'm trying to do. Please give me some tips on how the Vanguard account should be setup and how to fix or delete the existing Vanguard accounts in Quicken, without messing up the local Checking account.

Thanks, Tim Updegrove

simply put, all your vanguard funds will be in one vanguard investment account. including the mm account. It is the only way they can do this - even though you would prefer to have mm account separate. What I do, afterhaving 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.

alan

3.) Tell Quicken to unlink your linked cash account. (You can try it in a copy of your data to see if you like the results).

Thanks for the two replies. Sounds like the money market transactions should be in the investment account and not in the linked cash account. (My manual setup in 2004 had all the transactions in the linked cash account which was opposite.)

Let me try again. Use method #2 to create new Vanguard account and download all transactions. One transaction shows additional shares were bought (i.e. a check was written from, say, Bank of America, sent to Vanguard, and deposited into the money market account). Right clicking on the Vanguard buy transaction shows a "Use cash for this transaction" section with two options and "from this account's cash balance" is currently selected. It seems like the "Checking account for Bank of America" second option should be used. Selected this second option and deleted the original reconciled transfer transaction in the Bank of America checking account (correct balance now). However, now there is an unreconciled transaction in the Bank of America Checking account. How do I reconcile the new transaction in the Bank of America account?

Tim Updegrove

Any takers on the reconcile question?

How did you reconcile the other transactions in the account?

John,

Thank-you for taking the time here. Trying to get some advice before doing something stupid that I'll regret later.

I have referred to three accounts. (1) New, downloaded Vanguard account, (2) old, existing Vanguard account setup manually (with linked cash account where all the transaction are), and (3) old Bank of America Checking account.

I thought there have been posts saying changing/deleting/etc reconciled transactions is bad and a cause for problems. In my case, a reconciled transaction in the Bank of America Checking account has a category=[old Vanguard account] which is a payment from the checking account and a deposit into the old Vanguard account (i.e. essentially a transfer). After creating a new Vanguard account and downloading all transactions, the checking account "transfer" transaction needs to be changed to the new Vanguard account (because I want to delete the old Vanguard account). is this type of change okay? I'm worried about messing up/corrupting the checking account.

Tim Updegrove

I'm not sure what problems you might be thinking of regarding previously reconciled transactions.

It is true that there was at least one bug in older versions of Quicken (I do not think it exists any longer - I have not seen it in Q2005) that could cause a problem with the next reconcile if you altered the category of a reconciled transaction. While it was a pain, it could be "fixed"; and I can't imagine not correcting a category just because I would then have to re-reconcile.

I don't know of any other specific problems; and I'm not aware that there was ever any likelihood of corruption. The worst I can think of is that you might have to re-reconcile one time ... and I don't think that is likely.

Make a copy of your data; make your changes; test to see what the resulting status of reconciles is. You can always revert to your original data if something doesn't work as you like.

Hmmm, after reading your post, seems all my worry may have been for naught. I'll give it a try. Thank-you.

Yes, my last method seem to work and the checking account seems to have reconciled. Thank-you John.

Tim Updegrove