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How to record interest on money market account

RajM

I have many entries for interest paid on money market account's left over cash balance in investment account. They are downloaded as reinvestment type transactions. An example is shown in attached image.
I want to get rid of all money market related transactions and just convert them as cash balance. But, I don't know what is the best way to record this type of transaction. If I record them as "inc-income" type transaction, then Q asks for security name which doesn't apply. If I record them as "Deposit" type transaction, then Q asks for payee name. Even if I add some payee name here, the memorized payee list grows unnecessary because every transaction has different dollar amount.
Any idea what is the best way to handle them?

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Boatnmaniac

If you want to convert all of your MMF holdings to cash, I think the fastest and easiest way to do that would be to do a single Sell transaction to "Sell all shares in this account". Since it is a MMF, the price per share would be $1.00. The proceeds should be ticked to go to the account's cash balance. This process will remove all your held shares of the MMF and convert them to Cash but will retain the historical record.

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/6031128/uploads/editor/34/ox7vojg0o7sk.png

Is this what you are wanting to do? If not, would you provide a little more detail on what you are trying to accomplish?

RajM

Thanks for writing me. Originally, my goal was to eliminate all MMF entries, but I am realizing, I may not be able to do so.
I have three different types of MMF transactions, one "Bought", one "Sold" and one "ReinvDiv". I can safely delete Bought and Sold as they are almost in pair. It is the ReinvDiv type where I am stuck.
I see one problem with your solution. If I sell all MMF, the sell will be counted in Schedule D of tax (in Quicken). Although, the net gain/loss will be zero, but it will have unnecessary transactions under schedule D form.
After spending some more time on thinking, I am inclining to convert ReinvDiv transactions into Inc-Income(dividend income type). So, they will be converted into cash and preserve the income as dividend as reported on 1099 form.

Boatnmaniac

If you sell all your MMF you can keep it out of the Schedule D report by deselecting that security in the report customization (upper right gear icon).

Your plan (delete Bought and Sold transactions) is what I did with one of my MMFs a while back. Doing this will simply return all the cash used in these transactions back into the Cash bucket of the account. This can be done quickly in a mass delete process so it is not time consuming.

And your plan to change the ReinDiv transactions to Inc-Income (dividend) transaction is something I also did and it worked well but it can be a little time consuming to do them if there are a lot of transactions involved.

Regarding the ReinvDiv transactions: If you download transactions from your brokerage you might want to update your preferences in your online account to have your MMF dividends paid to your account cash balance instead of reinvested. Before I did that with my brokerage (Fidelity), every month I would get new ReinvDiv transactions downloaded that I would then need to manually change to the Inc-Income transactions. After I'd changed my online account preferences for this MMF to have the dividends paid to the account's cash balance all the monthly dividend transactions have downloaded as Inc-Income transactions. This might or might not work the same way with your brokerage but I thought I'd mention it.

NotACPA

If this is in a taxable account, how about using the "Show Cash in a checking account" feature of the Account Dialog (Tools, Account List, click Edit adjacent to the account name)?

That will move ALL of the cash transactions (but not the MMF transactions) to a separate fictional account. In my setup, this fictional account is my primary checking account.

RajM

Thanks everybody. Your suggestions are very useful.