changing account "type" from Retirement to asset

robertmills03255

It seems that once an account type is set at account creation you can not change it to a different class, or am I missing something?

The goal is to change a retirement account to an "asset" account, but that is not available on the Edit account details screen for the account, only other types of retirement (SEP IRA, ROTH IRA, etc) are available to select.

How can this be changes so reporting some of the new reporting gets grouped correctly?

Chris_QPW

Basically it can't.  That is a retirement account so it falls into the retirement display category and can't be changed.  For non retirement investment accounts the two possibilities are Investment and Retirement.  Non investment accounts have other possibilities.

I know part of the reason this is true is because besides the grouping in the Account bar this also affects where these show up in reports.  You can't run a report that is showing regular transactions like payee, category, payment for a transaction that is "bought", and as such some combinations of the "display type" don't make sense.

The only way you would be able to treat that account as an "asset" would be to create a non investment account and only keep track of the total amount.  Which of course would have all kinds of negative ramifications through the use of it in Quicken.

Sherlock

Generally, an account type is set when the account register is created and the account intent may be reset to a range limited by the account type.  It is possible to change an account type by creating a new account register and moving the transactions from the original register to the new register if the account types are compatible.

Please describe more precisely what it is you are attempting to accomplish and we may be able to provide more specific guidance.

robertmills03255

thanks. The specific issue is years ago(been on quicken for 20+ years) I created a single account to keep track of assets, and used retirement as the type (in error, or asset was not a feature). The account has items like cars, boats, house, art, etc., all as items with a value that is set like a security would be.

Think of it as having a "security" like house, or boat, and then setting the value every few months manually for each like you would for a stock without a ticker symbol. This was only way years ago, and allowed us track the increase/decrease and report on each all in a single account I named Family Assets.

The idea of moving 20 years of history (using bulk move) is viable, but seems like a field is just set wrong behind scenes needing a tweak.

open to ideas and any help.

Sherlock

robertmills03255 said:

thanks. The specific issue is years ago(been on quicken for 20+ years) I created a single account to keep track of assets, and used retirement as the type (in error, or asset was not a feature). The account has items like cars, boats, house, art, etc., all as items with a value that is set like a security would be.

Think of it as having a "security" like house, or boat, and then setting the value every few months manually for each like you would for a stock without a ticker symbol. This was only way years ago, and allowed us track the increase/decrease and report on each all in a single account I named Family Assets.

The idea of moving 20 years of history (using bulk move) is viable, but seems like a field is just set wrong behind scenes needing a tweak.

open to ideas and any help.

Essentially, you want to create an asset account for each of these securities and use their price histories for the running balance.  If you're comfortable programming, I suggest the export security list as a QIF which should include the price history of all the securities.  The program you would create would parse this QIF file to produce a QIF file you would import into your Quicken file to produce the desired asset accounts.  

I'm still not clear on why you would want to make the change.

Chris_QPW

robertmills03255 said:

thanks. The specific issue is years ago(been on quicken for 20+ years) I created a single account to keep track of assets, and used retirement as the type (in error, or asset was not a feature). The account has items like cars, boats, house, art, etc., all as items with a value that is set like a security would be.

An asset account like any other non investment account can only have one balance at any given time.
Therefore there would have to be one asset account for every asset.  It is pretty clear that the reason you went with an investment account is to track this all in one account.  You achieved that goal, but at the cost of it not fitting into the way Quicken usually deals with assets and as such it isn't surprising that Quicken doesn't really display information for these in the way you might want.

NotACPA

A better method to track your boat, car, etc., would have been to set up an Asset type account and assign an appropriate TAG to each item.  Then, it's a simple report, subtotaled by Tag for your separate amounts.