Fidelity - Stock from Reinvested Dividends go to Cash Management not Brokerage Account

donotemailhere989

I have Quicken 2016 for Windows.  I have a new Fidelity Brokerage Account and have successfully moved all stocks from my prior brokerage. When I set up the Fidelity brokerage account, Quicken automatically created a Cash management account.

When I update the stock prices all works as intended -- stocks prices are updated, and cash dividends go into the cash management account. So far so good. Now the problem.

When a mutual fund gave a reinvested dividend, the dividend and its automatically purchased stock showed up in the cash management account, not the brokerage account. So now I have some mutual fund stock in the brokerage account, and some in the cash management account. This seems an odd behavior. Of course, I can manually transfer the stock purchased from the reinvested dividend from the cash management account to the brokerage account, but that is a hassle if you have frequent reinvested dividends.

Did I miss something in setup of the account or is this the designed behavior?

Thanks for reading!

Sherlock

If you haven't already, I suggest you verify the account numbers: open the account and press Ctrl + Shift + E.  

donotemailhere989

The account numbers for the Brokerage and Cash Management accounts are the same. The Cash account was automatically set up in Quicken when I first downloaded prices from my brokerage account.

Sherlock

szchren said:

The account numbers for the Brokerage and Cash Management accounts are the same. The Cash account was automatically set up in Quicken when I first downloaded prices from my brokerage account.

I suspect you may have inadvertently added a duplicate account.   A Fidelity Cash Management account should be added as a brokerage account.   I suggest setting the account to show cash in a checking account if you intend to use the account to pay bills. etc..  If you have an additional Fidelity brokerage account, the account should have a different account number.

donotemailhere989

I have only added a brokerage account. As I said as soon a i downloaded prices for the first time, the cash management account was set up automatically by . . . .

Then when I got some reinvested dividends they went into the cash management account not the the brokerage account. Both accounts have the same account number and both accounts are not set to "show cash in a checking account".

Sherlock

szchren said:

I have only added a brokerage account. As I said as soon a i downloaded prices for the first time, the cash management account was set up automatically by . . . .

Then when I got some reinvested dividends they went into the cash management account not the the brokerage account. Both accounts have the same account number and both accounts are not set to "show cash in a checking account".

It appears you have a duplicated the account. When we setup the Online Services for an account, Quicken presents a list of the accounts obtained from the financial institution with a pull-down menu for each account found that allows us to add a new account register, link to an existing account register, or ignore the account.  I suspect you chose add when you should have chosen link.

At this point you have a few choices:  If you haven't made any other changes to the data file, I would recommend restoring a data file backup you saved before you setup the Online Services and then try to setup the Online Services for the account again.  If you have been updating the data file, you need to decide which account register you want to keep.  The quick and dirty approach would be to transfer the shares from the original account to the new account.  If there are only a few transactions in the original account, a better approach would be to enter them in the new account and then you'll be able to delete the original account.  If there are a lot of transactions in the original account, you could delete the new account and attempt to setup the Online Services again.

donotemailhere989

Thanks for you suggestions. It gave me some confidence to proceed . This is what I did to end up with a single account that has all my stock positions, re-ivested dividends, and cash in the same account.

1. Cut and pasted all the transactions (cash and reinvested dividends) from the Cash Management Account (CMA) -- that Fidelity had automatically set-up when I downloaded my stock positions for the first time after moving my account to Fidelity -- to the Brokerage account. All stock and cash totals were now correct in Brokerage Account and in one place.
2. Delete the CMA; this also removed online access to the Brokerage Account in Quicken
3. Setup online access again and to my surprise a completely new Brokerage account was set up in Quicken; so now I had two Fidelity brokerage accounts in Quicken  -- one with online access (the new one) and the old one with out it. As best I could see both were identical (remember I had cut and pasted transactions in the old account in step 1 above.
4. Deleted the old account 
5. That left me with the newly created Fidelity Brokerage account with the positions, cash and reinvested dividends correctly listed.
   
   (this is essentially your last suggestion in your last post, but I did not have many transactions accumulated "If there are a lot of transactions in the original account, you could delete the new account and attempt to setup the Online Services again." i.e., I might just as well deleted both my CMA and Brokerage account and avoided step 1, 2 and 4 above, and just set up online access again.

 Thanks for you help!