How should I record interest income, in my investment fund, that comes from a savings bank?

Dana Netherton

My father is now deceased; I'm the trustee for his widow, my mother. When he set up his Quicken files, he created some ... quirky ... accounts and categories. Over the last several years I have been trying to, um, regularize them.

The trust that I manage has several investment accounts. I am having trouble figuring out how to configure one of them. I will add that, for reasons that don't matter here, when I started working today the last transaction I found in that Quicken account was in 2013. I have hard-copy account statements from Dec 2016 to April 2017. The company's web site has ... nothing ... available for download. Not PDF files, not qfx files, not nothin'. (Don't get me started.)

Most of the catch-up seems straightforward, but one detail has me stumped. The fund uses a savings bank (not a money market fund) to hold its cash balance. The bank sometimes has a tiny bit of interest income. How can I record that income? What account or security should I tell Quicken that it comes from?

The first thing I tried was to create a new account for the bank account, because I know how to enter interest transactions in a bank account. Then I used that account as a "transfer account" for dividends in the investment fund that went straight to the cash balance (no dividends in that fund get reinvested).

However ... that still leaves the "cash balance" in the fund's own Quicken account ... dangling. Is there a way to configure the accounts, and the list of securities, so that the fund's "cash balance" can be updated by interest paid by the savings account?

I'm using Quicken Deluxe for Windows 2016, on a Windows 10 laptop.

And, by the way, I am keeping these accounts as "manual" as I can. Given how many changes the fund has seen since it was last updated, I don't think it would be prudent to hand the accounts over to an automatic process. I'm comfortable with manual account management. I have been doing this for a long time, with my own home's Quicken file.

Thanks for reading!

q_lurker

If you have one real-world brokerage account that hold securities, receives dividends, and these 'interest' deposits, et al.  Your options for the "Savings account" would be

1. treat it as a MM security
2. recognize the cash balance in the Quicken account as the balance in the "Savings account"  
3. as you have tried, create a separate Quicken account transferring cash back and forth between the brokerage account and the "savings account".

Personally, I'd likely go #1, and I know others would go #2 route.  

For that #2 route, you can still enter a MiscInc transaction for any amount and assign it to an appropriate category (_IntInc, Interest:Bank, Misc Income, ...)  You would not have to assign a 'security' to the income.   
  

Jim_Harman

q.lurker said:

If you have one real-world brokerage account that hold securities, receives dividends, and these 'interest' deposits, et al.  Your options for the "Savings account" would be

1. treat it as a MM security
2. recognize the cash balance in the Quicken account as the balance in the "Savings account"  
3. as you have tried, create a separate Quicken account transferring cash back and forth between the brokerage account and the "savings account".

Personally, I'd likely go #1, and I know others would go #2 route.  

For that #2 route, you can still enter a MiscInc transaction for any amount and assign it to an appropriate category (_IntInc, Interest:Bank, Misc Income, ...)  You would not have to assign a 'security' to the income.   
  

Or for the #2 route you can create a security called "XXX Brokerage Savings Account" or whatever and enter the interest using an Income transaction. This is essentially what TD Ameritrade does with cash.

Dana Netherton

Yes, to my eye Jim Harman's suggestion kinda resembles q.lurker's #1 route -- create an imaginary security that will describe the behavior of the brokerage's savings bank account, and then handle them all within that brokerage account. I like it.

Thanks, guys!