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Fidelity Brokerage Negative Cash Balance

BOB139

My Fidelity Brokerage shows negative cash balance.

I don't keep any cash in this account, only stocks.

How can I zero the cash balance?

This seems to be related to the settlement fund.

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Accepted answers

Sherlock

BOB139 said:

When I download from my Fidelity brokerage Quicken is showing transactions that never occurred.

It constantly downloads transactions for a "Fidelity Government Money Market" but when I look at the last 6 months of my Fidelity.com history as well as my Fidelity PDF statements these transactions are not shown.

How can I have Quicken accurately download my transactions and not download things that never happened?

I suggest you examine the OFX Log: select Help > Log Files. I suspect you'll find Fidelity is sending the transactions to Quicken.

All comments

Sherlock

It's simple enough to zero a cash balance but the question is why is there a negative cash balance? Settlement funds may be handled as cash or as a market mutual fund holding. An unexpected negative cash balance implies a withdrawal or share purchase without a corresponding deposit or sale of shares.

If the negative cash balance is due to a Revenue Credit to a 401k used to purchase shares, you may want to consider entering a deposit transaction. The other option is to replace the relevant Bought transactions with Added transactions.

BOB139

How do I zero the cash balance?

It's a brokerage account, not an IRA or 401k.

I login to Fidelity, transfer funds, and buy stocks. Quicken downloads some transactions about a money market fund but I never bought that ever.

Jim_Harman

Are you deleting some or all of those downloaded money market transactions? That would account for your negative cash balance.

BOB139

Maybe I did in the past, but that's only because things didn't add up in Quicken to begin with.

I've never made any transaction to buy or sell this money market fund. What can I do to get Qucken to balance correctly?

BOB139

Also I just login to Fidelity.com and look under my account history for the past 90 days.

It shows 0 sale or purchase of the Money Market.

It only shows 3 transaction for a 5 cent, 8 cent, and 6 cent dividend from the Money Market.

Quicken actually seems to agree with this. How can I track down the negative balance and get it zeroed out? I also have a checking account with this issue, balance in Quicken doesn't agree with bank even though its linked for online downloads.

Sherlock

BOB139 said:

Also I just login to Fidelity.com and look under my account history for the past 90 days.

It shows 0 sale or purchase of the Money Market.

It only shows 3 transaction for a 5 cent, 8 cent, and 6 cent dividend from the Money Market.

Quicken actually seems to agree with this. How can I track down the negative balance and get it zeroed out? I also have a checking account with this issue, balance in Quicken doesn't agree with bank even though its linked for online downloads.

To track down the source of the discrepancy, I suggest reconciling the account against the appropriate statements obtained from the financial institution.

Jim_Harman

What year, version, and build of Quicken are you running? Go to Help > About Quicken for this info.

The process to bring thing into balance may be different depending on your version.

BOB139

Running latest version.

Issue was the starting balance. Once I fixed that everything balances

BUT Quicken keeps making up phantom transactions for this money market that bring the balance out of whack and I need to go in and manually delete them.

When I view my transaction history in Fidelity I do not see these transactions.

NotACPA

If there's no cash in the account, where is Fidelity getting the cash for your purchase transactions? What's it doing with the cash from any sales?

And, can you give us a description of this "phantom transaction"? What's in the Payee name, the memo field, the amount, etc.

Lastly, "latest version" isn't a sufficient answer to Jim's question. Please do HELP, About Quicken as requested.

BOB139

I transfer the cash from a checking account or get a direct deposit.That shows up in Quicken correctly:

Date: 6/1/2019
Name: Company Name
Category: Net Salary

Or

Date: 6/1/2019
Name: FID BKG SVC LLC MONEYLINE
Category: [Checking Account XX1234]

The phantom transaction shows up as:

FIDELITY GOVERNMENT MONEY MARKET

Here is what Quicken shows: https://imgur.com/54l47cc

And in Fidelity transaction history I don't see anything for this fund, those dividends are just a few pennies: https://imgur.com/1mHSjFb

NotACPA

The payroll transaction is, presumably, a transfer into your Fido account. What's the Moneyline transaction on the same date? A deposit or a withdrawal?

What happens to that payroll deposit? Is in going into the Govt MMF or the FDIC insured account?

BOB139

Everything with payroll transaction and moneline is working as expected. Monelyline is the name that Quicken gives to transfers when downloading from Fidelity accounts.

Transfer is made into Fideilty and it shows up in cash balance.

The issue is when Quicken downloads from this account it creates these transactions for FIDELITY GOVERNMENT MONEY MARKET that don't appear in Fidelity history. These are making my cash balance inaccurate.

I just saw another post where someone has a similar problem: https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7854645/cash-reserves-cash-imbalance#latest

NotACPA

Moneyline is ALSO used to transfer money OUT OF Fidelity accounts. Thus my prior question.

AND, besides being a SuperUser here, I'm also a 30+ year customer of Fidelity and my accounts are located in Fidelity's "Private Client Group".

SO, please answer directly and simply the questions that you are asked ... and don't pontificate

BOB139

Moneyline is transfer from checking to Fideilty

> What happens to that payroll deposit?

It shows up in my Fidelity account as "Cash Available to Trade "

The transaction history on Fidelity.com shows:

DIRECT DEPOSIT COMPANY NAME PDIRECT DEP (Cash)

And the statement shows:

Deposit COMPANY NAME Direct Dep

Nowhere on my Fidelity.com login nor my statements can I find any transaction for FIDELITY GOVERNMENT MONEY MARKET. Only place I see these transactions is in Quicken after a download.

BOB139

When I download from my Fidelity brokerage Quicken is showing transactions that never occurred.

It constantly downloads transactions for a "Fidelity Government Money Market" but when I look at the last 6 months of my Fidelity.com history as well as my Fidelity PDF statements these transactions are not shown.

How can I have Quicken accurately download my transactions and not download things that never happened?

Sherlock

BOB139 said:

When I download from my Fidelity brokerage Quicken is showing transactions that never occurred.

It constantly downloads transactions for a "Fidelity Government Money Market" but when I look at the last 6 months of my Fidelity.com history as well as my Fidelity PDF statements these transactions are not shown.

How can I have Quicken accurately download my transactions and not download things that never happened?

I suggest you examine the OFX Log: select Help > Log Files. I suspect you'll find Fidelity is sending the transactions to Quicken.