cash in reports

Jeanne

I'm having a hard time figuring out what Quicken is doing when it gives me a "cash" number in a report that selects one kind of investment across multiple accounts. I'm trying to exclude both cash and money market funds and I'm still getting a cash number (smaller if I exclude "no security (includes cash)" and much larger if I include that security--neither one of which is reconcilable).

Moreover, when I create a report that should include all FOUR positions I've identified as Security Type MMF, I get one position with zero value (which is way way off) and another that is supposed to be hidden (correctly valued at zero). But *THREE* money market funds don't appear on the report at all. All relevant accounts are selected and all four MMFs are identified as such and all have trading symbols and cusip numbers.

Each account register's "holdings" reports "cash" that is clearly a combination of cash and MMF. And those numbers seem right.

So I'm a bit stymied in my troubleshooting regarding what is on the reports if I can't even generate a report with all the MMFs. *CAN* Quicken distinguish MMF from cash? And even if it can't, how do I get BOTH off the reports where I don't want either?

I've been at this for hours. This morning, I did file operations > validate and repair -- both repairing price history and rebuilding investing lots. Later I deleted and rebuilt price history. Nothing helped.

Many thanks for any insights,
Jeanne
Quicken Deluxe R33.24 (Windows)

Rocket J Squirrel

I'm not sure I fully understand your problem(s), but let me throw something out there. If you have mutual funds which contain positions in cash, those positions will show up as cash when looking at allocations even when "no security (includes cash)" is excluded. Look at the Asset Classes of your holdings. There may be cash hiding where you didn't expect it.

Jeanne

Rocket:
These are brokerage accounts that do contain some mutual funds. But they are not accounts at mutual fund companies (such that each mutual fund has a separate account number). So I *think* that this is not the situation you are referring to. If I'm misapprehending, do let me know. But in any case, thank you for trying.

Rocket J Squirrel

I think we're talking about 2 different things. Where the mutual funds reside is unimportant. What is important is their internal asset allocation, which may contain cash. As an example, here is FIVFX, which contains 4% cash according to Quicken's data download. That cash may be visible in reports, depending on the report.

Jeanne

Okay, I see that cash in security details and have never noticed it. So thanks. Have you seen this cash in Quicken reports?

But I'm not getting closer to a resolution of my problem.... I'm looking at four reports that all traverse 5 accounts: stocks, sector funds, non-sector funds, and fixed income. Each of these reports has the SAME number for cash. And totaling them does not give me anything near what is "cash" on my "All Investments" report or the total cash I can add up based on the registers. And those two aggregate cash numbers are different from each other. (That is, altho the grand total of investments + cash is the same in both the registers and my report, the break down is not the identical)

I haven't figured out how to dig deeper. I think if I could create an MMF report I could figure this out or, anyway, account for more of it. But teasing cash and MMFs apart is not going to keep me up at night IF ONLY I could exclude "cash" from all these reports. It's meaningless and requires me to do some arithmetic on each report.

Right now, my "All Investments" report subtotaled by investment type won't work without my fussing with security types a bit more. Maybe that's where I'll end up.

Bob_L

"Each account register's "holdings" reports "cash" that is clearly a combination of cash and MMF. And those numbers seem right."

That doesn't seem correct to me.  That is cash as reported in Holdings should only be what is truly cash, i.e. it  should not include the value of money market securities.

What report is your "all Investments" report?  If it is portfolio Value then you should see cash at the bottom and any MM funds with type set to Money Market would be grouped separately if the option to group by is set to Type.

Jeanne

> That doesn't seem correct to me. That is cash as reported in Holdings should only be what is truly cash, i.e. it should not include the value of money market securities.
> What report is your "all Investments" report? If it is portfolio Value then you should see cash at the bottom and any MM funds with type set to Money Market would be grouped separately if the option to group by is set to Type.

Doesn't seem right to me either, Bob.

My "all investments" report is based on the canned "Portfolio Value" report. Two of four MMFs are listed with shares but zero price so zero value; the other two are missing. The grand total is correct and "cash" is cash plus most MMF balances. I exported it so that I could drag it into Excel and sort to be sure I wasn't missing anything. (How come I can sort columns in Quicken expense reports but not in investment reports? Why the effective loss of functionality? But I digress.)

Even my ACCOUNT REGISTERS > HOLDINGS list large cash positions that are actually mostly MMFs. In Security Details, I've identified the MMFs, and the cusips are correct. There are transactions listed in security details and in the registers. Still Quicken is not correctly identifying and segregating the MMFs in the HOLDINGS tab of the registers or in reports.

I'll talk about the two largest accounts with large MMF positions and no linked checking account. In the REGISTERS > HOLDINGS:
(a) A Fidelity account has all MMF combined with cash as "cash" in the list of securities and in the ACCOUNT STATUS immediately below. Its MMF is nowhere to be found.
(b) The Merrill Lynch account has different numbers in the same two places. The amount in the ACCOUNT STATUS section matches what is on ML's web site. The amount of cash listed among the securities is lower by a fair amount, and the security value is higher than in the ACCOUNT STATUS box by the same amount. And, still, there is no MMF listed there. Scanning each position doesn't lead to any AHA! moment.

The difference between the two numbers at ML matches the discrepancy I wrote about before: that my report and the sum total of the registers gives the same grand totals but the split between cash and investments is not identical. So I'm closer than I was yesterday to knowing where the problem lies.

The difference is not enormous but it is by no means a rounding error.

The ONLINE CENTER > COMPARE TO PORTFOLIO says all is well at ML; but there, I've got the right MMF listed with the right value. The ONLINE CENTER lists no MMF or cash for the Fidelity account, but the COMPARE TO PORTFOLIO button is greyed out.

On the other hand, as I said, I'm not really losing sleep over the difference between cash and MMFs. I really set out to get this "cash" line off reports where it's meaningless and a bother. But that journey has clearly led to reasonable questions.

I'll try to answer any questions in the hope that we all might learn something. But I'm moving on and working around this. It's exhausting.

But thanks,
Jeanne

Bob_L

I can't speak to ML or Fidelity for regular accounts so there could be something different as to how they handle cash.  I use Vanguard and am used to seeing cash being swept into a separate money fund security, but there are settlement lags between sales and buys of the money fund.  Regardless, within Quicken cash is cash and shares of money fund are just that.  

q_lurker

(a) A Fidelity account has all MMF combined with cash as "cash" in the list of securities and in the ACCOUNT STATUS immediately below. Its MMF is nowhere to be found.

I am not a Fidelity customer.  Perhaps @NotACPA can comment more accurately.  I believe Fidelity in at least some accounts does NOT download sweep MMF transaction data and holding status.  Since the transactions are not downloaded, when you get a cash dividend, for example, and Fidelity sweeps that into a MMF, your Quicken records will not show that transaction; the money will stay in cash as far as Quicken is concerned.  I know some users prefer that type of setup as it avoids a bunch of essentially meaningless transactions.  So your info from Fidelity might show a lot of MMF and perhaps a small amount of cash, but the comparable Quicken info would show all cash.  That is not the same as saying Quicken has 'combined MMF with cash' which suggests Quicken knows about the Fidelity MMF in this account and has magically treated it as cash.  If my presentation is at all accurate, Quicken does not know about the "current" MMF status.  [ I qualified 'current' because it is possible that somewhere along the line some MMF transactions might have been entered for this account and your Quicken may be showing some MMF assets currently.]

I don't know if any of that applies to the ML setup.

Chris_QPW

Jeanne said:

I'll talk about the two largest accounts with large MMF positions and no linked checking account. In the REGISTERS > HOLDINGS:
(a) A Fidelity account has all MMF combined with cash as "cash" in the list of securities and in the ACCOUNT STATUS immediately below. Its MMF is nowhere to be found.
(b) The Merrill Lynch account has different numbers in the same two places. The amount in the ACCOUNT STATUS section matches what is on ML's web site. The amount of cash listed among the securities is lower by a fair amount, and the security value is higher than in the ACCOUNT STATUS box by the same amount. And, still, there is no MMF listed there. Scanning each position doesn't lead to any AHA! moment.

The difference between the two numbers at ML matches the discrepancy I wrote about before: that my report and the sum total of the registers gives the same grand totals but the split between cash and investments is not identical. So I'm closer than I was yesterday to knowing where the problem lies.

q_lurker said:

(a) A Fidelity account has all MMF combined with cash as "cash" in the list of securities and in the ACCOUNT STATUS immediately below. Its MMF is nowhere to be found.

I am not a Fidelity customer.  Perhaps @NotACPA can comment more accurately.  I believe Fidelity in at least some accounts does NOT download sweep MMF transaction data and holding status.  Since the transactions are not downloaded, when you get a cash dividend, for example, and Fidelity sweeps that into a MMF, your Quicken records will not show that transaction; the money will stay in cash as far as Quicken is concerned. 

I was a Fidelity customer until a bit ago, and I'm a Vanguard customer and they definitely do it differently.
On the  Fidelity site they have a MMF account, but they never download any transactions for it, so all the cash goes into the cash balance of the account unless the user manually enters such transactions (which is pretty useless/time consuming).

Vanguard on the other hand does download the MMF transactions and as such "eventually" the cash balance goes to zero.  I say eventually because if I buy a security today, the buy transaction will be downloaded the next day and the cash needed for it will be taken from the cash balance, resulting in a negative number.  Then two days later they will send down the MMF sell transaction, which will zero out the cash.

The bottom line is that at any given time you might have to add the MMF amount and the cash amount to get what is reported at the brokerage.  There isn't anything wrong with any of these approaches, one just has to look at the transactions and understand how a give broker does it.

NotACPA

@jeanne, Let's start at the beginning.

Exactly what report are you looking at that's showing "cash".  Is it one of Q's canned reports, or is it a report that you've customized in some way?

Looking at the "Investment Asset Allocation" report (shown below") I'm seeing the cash held by my various MF's AND the $0.01 penny actually held in the account.  For investment performance purposes, this is all cash and it will experience the same rate or return whether it's held IN a fund or as cash in the same account.

I just now ran the "Portfolio Value" report for that same account ... and the only cash that it showed was that $0.01 that IS actually present in the account ... this report doesn't dig down into the holdings with the account to view their asset allocation.  SO, I'm confused as to what you're looking at.

@q_lurker's comment, my wife has about $2,400 in an "FDIC Insured Deposit Sweep" in her Rollover IRA ... and the interest on that amount DID download the end of June.

There was a $0.02 balance in the account before the transactions shown, thus the ending balance.

Jeanne

> I was a Fidelity customer until a bit ago, and I'm a Vanguard customer and they definitely do it differently.

Chris, thank you for your explanation, which you write with reassuring confidence. If one brokerage can do it differently, others can do it in yet other ways. So it really is time to stop worrying about this.

You also clarified something else. I kept thinking there were all these entries in the MMFs. But there weren't. I was looking at dividend and interest payments but there were not a lot of sweeps recorded. The big Merrill MMF position has nothing but the starting position in Security Details. The big Fidelity MMF position has what appear to be dividend payments of the MMF but not the sweeps into the fund.



> but there are settlement lags between sales and buys of the money fund. Regardless, within Quicken cash is cash and shares of money fund are just that.

Bob, I'm not talking about settlement lags; I'm talking about a large MMF position that is characterized as cash. And Quicken certainly should distinguish, but as Chris tells us, the institutions don't all account and report in the same manner.



> If my presentation is at all accurate, Quicken does not know about the "current" MMF status.

Q_lurker, what you describe is interesting and may explain some of this--altho I'm talking about large and long-standing MMF balances. Still, I do acknowledge that the questions I'm raising have something to do with the way the institutions are feeding data into Quicken and not some exotic programming at Intuit.



> Looking at the "Investment Asset Allocation" report (shown below") I'm seeing the cash held by my various MF's AND the $0.01 penny actually held in the account.

NotACPA, as mentioned, I'm using the Portfolio Value report. Since I've never looked at the Asset Allocation report tho, thank you! No, the Portfolio Value report does not break out the cash in each fund as the Asset Allocation report does. It gives me one big lump sum that evidently equals cash + MMF.

What I think I understand so far is that the cash numbers in the account registers = the cash + MMFs + mutual fund cash positions. They add up to the total cash in the Asset Allocation Report. The Portfolio Value report shows only the cash and MMFs in the "cash" line, and each security in the Portfolio Value report is listed just once without breaking out mutual fund portfolios into one or more asset classes (cash being one of those asset classes).

Thus we have accounted for one discrepancy I wrote about yesterday: Portfolio Value report and account registers giving me the same grand totals with some difference in the balance of cash vs. investments.

I'm not so interested in the analysis of the allocation report. But note that I've got -cash- at both the top and bottom of this section.

This leads to some strangeness. The top -cash- number is not included in the "total cash" subtotal, but it gets incorporated into the grand total, greatly inflating total assets. When I add all the subtotals in the report, I get the right total assets and that matches the total assets found in both the account registers and Portfolio Value report.

On multiple counts, I find the Portfolio Value report more useful. And with the help of a number of you, I've learned to stop worrying about "cash" vs. MMFs.

For the record, in both reports, two of the four MMFs are still listed with no value and two are missing.

========================
Please don't ask me to reconcile any more numbers! ;-)

But many thanks to all,
Jeanne

Jeanne

NotACPA: How did you embed your image in-line as you did? I only saw a way to attach it.

Thanks.

NotACPA

Jeanne said:

NotACPA: How did you embed your image in-line as you did? I only saw a way to attach it.

Thanks.

Per your profile (click on your name in your message), you currently have 37 points in this forum.

I believe that it takes 50 points before the "embed" function is made available.  I have almost 510,000 points

Jeanne

Aha! Yes, I'm a newcomer to the forum. It just seemed nicer for the reader if I could embed, but I won't argue.

Thanks for the explanation.