Asset Allocation to include Cash and Savings accounts?

hyyqckn

When you select Investing in the left sidebar, it shows the dashboard with a Allocations by Asset Class chart in the lower right hand.

Is there anyway to include all your savings and cash accounts so that the chart incorporates all the cash you hold in non-brokerage accounts?

It should show asset allocation for ALL your assets, not just those categorized as Investing in Quicken parlance.

jacobs

No, it doesn’t work that way. As you wrote above, your first step was clicking on Investing in the left sidebar. Like everything else in Quicken, what you select in the left sidebar defines or constrains everything you see on the right side of the screen. So it wouldn’t make sense to click on Investing and see data for non-investing accounts.

If you want an overview of your total holdings, including cash and savings, the Net Worth report gives you that. (If you don’t want to see credit card debt or loans, you can edit the report so only include the accounts you want.) Of course, this report doesn’t “drill down” on the asset class makeup of your investment accounts like the Dashboard, but using those two together gives you pretty complete insight into your holdings.

hyyqckn

I was hoping maybe I could customize a report to integrate ALL assets. Some of the bank accounts have very significant balances so it makes no sense to have an Asset Allocation chart which doesn't incorporate all your assets.

I guess the AA chart in Quicken isn't too useful for people who want to track their investments and assets, even though I got the Deluxe version for that purpose.

jacobs

Again, I would use a Net Worth report to include all your bank account balances, and use the investing asset allocation to drill down to the breakdown of your investment accounts. 

Note that the Dashboard asset allocation can't be exported or printed. The portfolio asset allocation, which is where you'd print or export this type of data, is not yet using the new detailed asset allocation data used in the Dashboard. So you may find you have a lot of "Asset Mixture" unless you disable your securities from using Quicken's downloaded asset mixture and re-assign each one to a single asset class. This will hopefully be fixed in the next update. Once that's done, you could export your investment asset allocation data to a spreadsheet, and manually add your bank accounts if you wish to see the asset class percentages recalculated incorporating those cash balances.

Chris_QPW

I thought I would just throw out something as some information you might find interesting on this subject.

Quicken Windows allows for setting the "intent" on an account to various settings like Spending, Savings, ... which it uses for grouping things in reports and such.  Investment accounts can only be Investment or Retirement, but non-investment accounts can actually be set to Investment or Retirement along with the other ones.

Doing this seemed to be exactly what @hyyqckn and others like me would want for "cash accounts" that part of your long term/retirement/investments.

And it "mostly works".  Those accounts show up able to be selected in the portfolio, the asset allocation and the investment reports.  But when you start to look at the details it starts to breakdown.  The investment reports expect fields like the action, which there isn't one, and other performance fields in the portfolio don't work as expected.  For instance, it would show a return of 75% in an account that is getting .5% interest.  The bottom line is that they made the attempt, but you are cramming in two different kinds of data into different parts that expect one or the other kind of data, and it can get pretty crazy.

What I ended up doing is manually maintaining my "cash account" as investment account with me buying/reinvesting a dummy security InvestCash.  This makes things work a lot better when trying to think of as an investment.

hyyqckn

Yeah I can do the data on my own spread sheets.

Or some of the brokerage sites lets you generate an aggregate AA chart by incorporating all the assets you have with them and adding in outside investments.

I have brokerage accounts at more than one institution, so that is what I end up doing.

In any event, the Quicken presentation is done well, pretty to look at. Just wish it was more flexible or user-editable so that I can get a better picture.

I came from Bankivity, which does a good job of investment tracking and presentation. But they went subscription and they charge more. They do a good job of downloading data automatically as well as letting you import OFX/QFX files.

So they've never gotten balances wrong and it's much easier to retain years of transactions on investment and bank accounts.

Before Bankivity I used Quicken Essentials and that worked okay for me but I recall that also had negative balances on some bank accounts which I couldn't easily reconcile.

So something about Quicken they seem to be using some kind of cash flow to generate a balance. When you click Reconcile, they actually show you the online balance. Except the online balance has been wrong on a couple of the imported accounts that I connected. So easier to delete and re-add them, but that means losing older transactions.

Oh well I will try this for a year, since I paid like $31 for the subscription.

jacobs

Quicken's reconciliation math is actually quite simple: it's the sum of all your transaction history of money in and out. If you're reconciling to an online balance, then that number if coming from your bank. Some banks allow pending transactions into the balance they report, which can cause problems with reconciling in Quicken if the pending transactions aren't there yet. I don't know if that's your problem, or something else in your data; it's hard to guess because I can't see what you're seeing.