How to convert an Investing Account to Banking Account

Fink5150

I have a Fidelity Checking account. It's my main banking account for spending and bill paying. Quicken imported it as an Investment account. How do I convert it to a banking account?

Jon

Which firm is your account with? If it's truly a checking account at one of the several regional Fidelity banks, then you'll have to set up a new account as there's no way to change an investment account to a banking account. Make sure you select the correct account type & bank when creating the account.

However, I suspect what you really have is a Cash Management account at Fidelity Investments, in which case Quicken will treat the account as an investment account & you cannot change that (since it is not actually a checking account). Over in the Product Ideas forum there's a suggestion to allow users to reorganize accounts in the account sidebar and I would encourage you to add your vote to that. Such a feature would let you move the CMA to the same group as your other banking accounts regardless of the account type.

NotACPA

Fidelity is an Investment firm, not a bank.  Therefore they CANNOT offer a true checking account .... but instead offer an account that for most aspects works like a checking account ... but there are legal differences.

Because they're an investment firm, your "checking" account is, actually, an investment account.

In QWin, there's an options to "Show cash in a checking account" ... but that has not yet been implemented in QMac.

jacobs

NotACPA said:

In QWin, there's an options to "Show cash in a checking account" ... but that has not yet been implemented in QMac.

Nonetheless, in Quicken Mac you can enter deposits and checks in the investment account just as you would if it were a separate checking account; the only difference is that transactions in the investment account must use Type=Payment/Deposit is order to access all the normal banking fields.

One thing you can't do is move the account in the left sidebar from Investing to Banking, but that's just a cosmetic issue with the sidebar. (One one the developers will hopefully change some day by allowing custom account groupings in the sidebar.)

DavidDyar

Jacob, I just ran into the issue of trying to categorize my Fidelity Investment (checking) account to show as a transfer automatically from the Fidelity account to Cash. There is no such option. When I had the Windows Quicken version you could set the Fidelity income account to show as a checking account and you would do that type of categorization. I can't understand why Quicken can't make both versions with the exact same features.

DavidDyar

Sorry I was wrong, there is a "transfer" option on the categorization for the Fidelity income account.