Projected Balances for Investment Accounts is Incorrect

Eric_S

I'm using Bills & Income - Projected Accounts to manage my cash flow and project contributions to, among other things, my investment accounts.

This tool is fairly useful for bank and credit card accounts- it seems to start correctly with the current balance, and shows upcoming bill and income entries, even correctly handling transfers.

For investment accounts, there is an issue with the beginning balance. It seems to show the projected future entries correctly. But the beginning balances don't make sense.

There's more than one thing going wrong here.

For investment accounts that are linked to the brokerage, it shows the beginning balance as zero on the Projected Balance chart. It then shows the accumulation of projected deposits, but the balance is wrong, because it's starting with a zero balance. Note that the balance on the account screen for these accounts is correct.

For manually created accounts, where It's not linked to the brokerage and I manually entered the starting balance- it *seems* to show these starting balances in the projection. I say *seems*, because they don't actually add up. If I show, for example, "All investment accounts" or "All Brokerage Accounts" or "All Retirement Accounts" - NONE of the starting balances match up with the actual starting balances of these accounts. The starting balance is close to the sum of the manually created account balances, but it is off my a amount that doesn't make sense.

I believe there are two bugs here:
- Not using the current balance from linked investment accounts
- For manually created investment accounts, the beginning balance does not reflect actual beginning balances of those accounts.

Note that I'm not using budgeting - just the account registers and Bills/Income for projected transactions. This is almost a perfect modeling tool, but this is a significant flaw.

The issue also shows up when graphing projected net worth with "All Accounts" - this amount is also clearly missing the investment beginning balances.

Quicken_Natalie

Hello Eric,

Thank you for providing the details of this issue to the Community, although I apologize you have not yet received a response.

It seems we may need a bit more information to be able to assist further. Please take a moment to review the information available here and post back to let us know what version/release of Quicken you're using.

The more information you can provide regarding this issue will help the Community to better understand and assist.

Thank you,

Quicken Natalie 

Eric_S

Thanks for the response Natalie, here's my version info.

Quicken Mac / US info:
Quicken Premier 2020
Version 5.13.3 (Build 513.30586.100)
Mac OS 10.15.2

Every Projected Balance graph in Bills & Income that includes investment accounts, has an incorrect starting balance as noted above. By looking at accounts in isolation, you see that the Linked investment accounts all start with a zero balance on the chart, even though the are not zero. For manually created accounts, it seems the beginning balances are there- but somehow still don't add up correctly. If you click on the account pages for the investment accounts, the account balances are there (and of course, the balances show up in the menu bar on the left as well).

Quicken_Tyka

Hello @Eric_S

Thank you for providing some more details, although I apologize that you haven't received a follow-up response.

I have a few more questions to help me understand what could be happening.

What type of accounts are these brokerage accounts? Are they retirement accounts or just a brokerage account?

Also, what type of transactions are being scheduled in these accounts? Are they transfer for example?

Lastly, do the accounts have a cash balance? When I create a scheduled transaction from my brokerage account, I am present with today's balance being $0 because I do not track the cash balance of the account. 



Please let me know!

-Quicken Tyka

Eric_S

Hi Thanks for the response. In order to project my cash flow and balances, I'm modeling transfers from my bank accounts to both brokerage and retirement accounts (and they are behaving the same way in this regard). I think you have identified the issue though- these accounts are invested in various funds and stocks, and thus don't have meaningful cash balances. However, tracking the cash balances of the investments in this regard is pretty useless. What I was hoping to get from Quicken was a projection of the investment values, and then to see this in the net worth projection, etc. I understand that this projection is very limited- it isn't going to project gains or losses, of course. It would be interesting to model gains/losses - but I can live without that. But the projection screen would make more sense if it at least showed the asset value over time given the modeled transfers into those accounts. Otherwise, there simply is no use in having those charts available that I can see... At least as an option, it would be very useful to have the initial value on the charts start with the current asset value shown in the account information screen.

Quicken_Tyka

Hello @Eric_S

Thank you for the response and for providing more details.

It would appear that this feature doesn't currently exist in Quicken for Mac.

I was unable to locate an existing Idea for a projected balance feature for investments, I would ask that you take a moment to review the information available here and create a new Idea post that others may vote on.

Thank you,

-Quicken Tyka