New 401k account created as single-mutual fund; buggy cash behavior

Scott Buchanan

Environment

Version 5.5.3 (Build 55.21566.100)
macOS 10.13.3

Overview

I created a new 401k account and tried entering a manual cash deposit from my checking account, but it will not record correctly. I've seen three separate behaviors, all wrong.

As I experimented, it seems to come down to the way the account was created: automatically via the online account setup of another account at the same institution, which then discovered this account as well. Further investigation (see final section below) turned up the cause as the account being marked incorrectly as a single mutual fund account.

So there are two categories of bugs here:

1. Incorrect "single mutual fund" configuration at account creation
2. Odd/buggy behavior with "single mutual fund" option set

Attempt #1

I first initiated the contribution from the checking account screen by setting the category to the special transfer type. Over in the 401k, Quicken recorded it as two transactions: a stock purchase of a random security I hold in an entirely different account and a share adjustment back to zero.

I deleted the transactions before capturing any screenshots of this, though, and I haven't been able to reproduce it again.

Attempt #2

I again initiated the contribution from the checking account screen the same way:



This time it recorded in the 401k as a single transaction, albeit a "Buy" rather than a "Payment/Deposit" as it should have:



Furthermore, this was not actually reflected on the portfolio tab:



Attempt #3

After again deleting the incorrect transaction, I now tried to enter the contribution from the 401k account itself, this time choosing the "Payment/Deposit" type explicitly and the converse transfer category to pull it from my checking account:



In this case, though, I just couldn't save it at all. Clicking the save button wouldn't do anything: it didn't display any error or other message. It just did nothing at all. My only option was to hit cancel, in which case oddly a transaction was still entered, but of a blank Buy:



Likely Root Cause

Out of curiosity, I tried intentionally entering a fake Buy transaction of my own to see if that would work. Interestingly, when I did so I received this odd message:



Once I chose yes, I was able to create a successful deposit. Furthermore, even after deleting the fake buy transaction, so that the account was empty again, I was able to create a deposit without any of the above buggy behavior.

Scott Buchanan

Since I posted this, the situation has gotten worse with 5.5.4. I still see the same issue, but now the checkbox in the account settings to identify whether the account is a single account mutual fund (which was an alternate route to solving the problem) is missing. Entering a fake Buy transaction to trigger the warning dialog above is now the only route to fixing a broken account.

Scott Buchanan

I just tried opening 5.5.3, and the option wasn't there either, so maybe it's not a change in the most recent version. Now I'm not sure what the pattern is for the option being present or not is: maybe after choosing to disable the single-fund mutual fund mode, the option goes away. (As I recall, when you choose to disable single-fund mode, it gives you a warning that you "may" not be able to switch back.)

Assuming I'm remembering correctly, I believe the checkbox appeared either to the right of or below the "type" drop-down, where the red arrow here indicates:

Scott Buchanan

And yes, the accounts where this happened were created as part of connecting to a brokerage. When I first had the issue I tried creating a 401(k) account manually and could not reproduce the issue, even while simultaneously seeing it on the ones that were auto-created.

Quicken Marcus

Scott Buchanan said:

And yes, the accounts where this happened were created as part of connecting to a brokerage. When I first had the issue I tried creating a 401(k) account manually and could not reproduce the issue, even while simultaneously seeing it on the ones that were auto-created.

A Single Mutual Fund/401K account doesn't have a cash balance.  At the brokerage, the transfer is automatically converted into a buy and there is never a cash position in the account.  

The Single Mutual Fund/401K feature is to offset downloaded buy transactions with hidden transfers so the balance stays at 0 cash.  The feature is triggered by the brokerage telling us it's an SMF or 401K account and they don't send us a cash balance or the cash balance is 0 and in the case of a single mutual fund account there can only be a single security.   

Previously, a single mutual fund account or 401k required the user to transfer cash into the account to maintain a 0 balance which was a lot of work for people.

Scott, I think there are 2 issues going one. 

1) The brokerage is telling us your account is a single mutual fund.  We doa bunch of checks to double check the data we are being sent but clearly something is going wrong there Quicken is misidentifying this account.

2) It would be great to better understand the second part where you turn off the single mutual fund feature but you're still seeing a buy transaction getting created from the transfer.  This should NOT be happening since you're no longer in Single Mutual Fund mode so we're not sure what this is still happening.

I'm going to contact you directly to see if we can work together to figure out what's going on.  Thanks for reporting this in the forums.