Quicken needs to a way to treat a sweep security as cash

Ray

Schwab's Thomas Partners fund and other funds use a sweep security to obtain higher income for cash in the account than received from a money market. At the end of the day, if there's cash the fund purchases more share, and if it needs cash it sells shares. Schwab reports the sweep security as cash in the account and not as a security holding.

In the Thomas Partners fund, Schwab uses Government Money SWGXX as a sweep security. Before the Schwab update in November 2021, only SWGXX dividends were added as transactions. Since then, buys and sells are added too. Every buy or sell needs to be manually deleted to obtain the correct cash balance. This requires a lot of editing.

Quicken should ignore buys and sells from a sweep security but post dividends. As Schwab reports all transactions including the buys and sells, Quicken might add a security type that will ignore buys and sells but still accept the dividends. This would save me a lot of time and keep my cash matching Schwab's cash.

NotACPA

If this is in a taxable account, how about just recording the cash as "Show cash in a checking account"?  This can be set by doing TOOLS, Account List, clicking EDIT adjacent to the taxable account name and selecting that option.

My MMF at Fidelity is set to use this feature and all of my "cash" transactions download regularly.

Chris_QPW

NotACPA said:

If this is in a taxable account, how about just recording the cash as "Show cash in a checking account"?  This can be set by doing TOOLS, Account List, clicking EDIT adjacent to the taxable account name and selecting that option.

My MMF at Fidelity is set to use this feature and all of my "cash" transactions download regularly.

I don't think this will help.

Note that when a "Show cash in a checking account" is used the "cash transactions" are routed to that account.  If the problem is with "buy/sell" transactions, they won't be handled any differently.

Tom Young

In your Quicken Schwab Account you might try clicking on "Update cash balance..." and then clicking the "Cash Representation" button.  That might get you to where you want to be.

The whole issue of "security vs. cash" has been discussed here

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7904263/another-schwab-issue-swvxx-is-a-security-it-is-not-cash-edited/p1

NotACPA

@Chris_QPW,

But since I show the MMF as if it were cash, every buy/sell gets recorded as a transaction the pseudo-checking account.  I just ignore that there's a security involved, and Q handles it perfectly.

And this pseudo-account is my primary "checking account".

Chris_QPW

NotACPA said:

@Chris_QPW,

But since I show the MMF as if it were cash, every buy/sell gets recorded as a transaction the pseudo-checking account.  I just ignore that there's a security involved, and Q handles it perfectly.

And this pseudo-account is my primary "checking account".

I didn't know about the option to treat the sweep security as cash, that would change it completely.

But I'm baffled at what allows one to tell Quicken to treat the sweep security as cash.
I see from the thread that @Tom Young posted there is supposedly an option for this, but for every one of my accounts if I bring up Update Cash Balance I don't get that option I only get this:


So, that looks like something that is financial institution dependent.

Rocket J Squirrel

In my experience, treatment of "cash" is brokerage-dependent. Morgan Stanley uses "bank deposits." Fidelity considers my sweep mutual fund to be cash and omits buys & sells, which is what I prefer. And I don't have, need, or want a "cash management account"; I can write checks or e-bill pay directly from my brokerage account. Apparently Schwab keeps "cash" represented as the money fund it's actually in.

UKR

I must be the lucky one. My brokerage, E*Trade, has never downloaded Sweep Activity transactions (sweep idle cash into a MMF Sweep account or bring it back when needed). That means, I don't have to track it in my investment registers either. Portfolio holdings in Quicken also never receives information about Sweep Account holdings.
Everything's reflected in the register's cash balance. To reconcile my account's cash balance, I just use their statement's Total Cash and Equivalents balance (which is the sum of unswept idle cash plus MMF balance).