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Mutual fund sales show up as negative cash transactions

aggilb071679

Any idea why Quicken is treating sales of mutual funds in my retirement account as taking cash out of the account?
There's a monthly fee on my retirement account, paid for by selling fractions of a mutual fund. The downloaded transactions correctly decrease the share balance, but instead of increasing the cash balance, Quicken appears to DECREASE it.
What am I missing? Why are sales taking cash out of my account?
Also, is there a better way to record sales of mutual funds to pay administrative fees/expenses?

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Accepted answers

volvogirl

To check if it is a Single Mutual Fund SMF open the Account List. Go to Tools-Account List or do Ctrl+A. Click Edit by the Account. There might be a checkbox for Single Mutual Fund.

Or you might be able to change it on the Holding Tab.
See 2 screen shots (from my Q2013).

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/6031128/uploads/editor/9o/hmh1ac47ohoj.jpg

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/6031128/uploads/editor/ap/9t842pgiggt3.jpg

All comments

Jim_Harman

You need to review the details of the Sold transactions to understand what is happening to your cash balance. Did you record the fee as a commission?

Is this account set up as a "Single mutual fund" account?

Usually you should record the sales for fees with the proceeds going to the account's cash balance then record a MiscExp to withdraw the fees.

aggilb071679

I download the transactions and don't enter them manually, so I had to take another closer look at the entries. They appear to be set up as you described, as a sale with proceeds going to the account's cash balance. No fee/commission is on the sale transaction. (See attached screenshot)

I wonder if it's an error in how the financial institution provides the data because I mocked up a new transaction and it was recorded as expected.

This account currently only has a single mutual fund, but I'm not aware of an account-level setting where I would be able to specify it as a "single mutual fund" account.

image.png

volvogirl

aggilb071679

Ok, I don't see that option so it's not a single mutual fund account. It's correctly set up as a 401k/403b account.

I did some more digging into my initial issue and it does appear that the values are coming in incorrectly from the financial institution. I figured out how to re-process the transactions after download (edit the transaction, make no changes, then save) and Quicken correctly handles the cash.

So all along it was a data issue from the bank. It'd be nice if Quicken applied some logic/validation to downloaded transactions (besides format), but I have a way to force them to be processed correctly so I'll survive.