Why do my Fidelity accounts in Quicken for Mac have higher balances 95% of the time?

Laura JJ

In Quicken Online for Windows, I set up our Fidelity IRA accounts to only update the balances because I was having so many problems with the downloaded transactions. The Fidelity balances matched the Quicken balances and everything worked fine until I converted to Quicken for Mac. Most days the IRA balances in Quicken are substantially higher than the Fidelity balances. However, on a couple of occasions - this morning included, the balances in Quicken were spot on. But when I looked at Quicken a few hours later, the balances were much higher than those in Fidelity again. All of the account balances seem to behave the same way. They are all correct or they are all too high. What gives?

Boatnmaniac

Hi @Laura JJ .  I suspect your account balance issues are related to the Core Account Money Market Fund.  The default MMF that Fidelity uses for this is SPAXX** (the ** is simply how Fidelity identifies the Core Account in the Positions tab of the online account) but there are a few other MMFs that can be used as the Core Account.  The Core Account is where Fidelity holds cash and it replaces the more traditional Sweep Account (also still available at Fidelity).

When Fidelity downloads into Quicken it downloads the value of the Core Account as the Cash Balance.  If, however, the settings in your online account are not set up correctly, Fidelity will also download the Core Account MMF shares which causes the account value in Quicken to be overstated...often by a large amount.

To fix the issue you need to stop the downloads of the Core Account MMF shares.  It will also take some fixing of your account in Quicken to get rid of the Core Account MMF shares already showing up there.  In the end your account in Quicken should have not Core Account MMF holdings and the value of those shares will show up only as the account's Cash Balance.

You might want to read through this thread:  https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7873475/downloads-from-fidelity-do-not-included-activity-into-the-settlement-fund#latest.  This thread spells out a process for fixing this issue.  The process is spelled out for Quicken for Windows but at the bottom of the thread are comments by a Mac user that might be applicable to you.  And since you are familiar with both Windows and Mac perhaps you will be able to piece it all together relatively easily.