How are Money Market Funds treated in Quicken Mac?

Dan R NC

I currently use Q Win Deluxe and I'm testing out using Q Mac instead. One thing I've noticed is Schwab Money Market Funds (Schwab Value Advantage Money Fund - SWVXX) are not treated in the same manner in Q Mac as they are in Q Win (and real life).

In Q Win, the money market funds are treated as securities and they are listed separate from the "Cash" value in the accounts. In real life (at Schwab), they are treated as shares in a fund that maintains a $1/share value, but they are not treated as cash (SWVXX is not a "sweep" account).

In Q Mac, they are listed as a security in the Securities Window, but there is no check mark in the Currently Held column. They also don't show up in the Portfolio View. Instead, the value of the SWVXX fund in included in the Cash value shown in the Portfolio view.

Why does Q Mac say I don't hold any shares of SWVXX, even though I do, in five different accounts?

The handling of money market funds in Q Mac doesn't seem to be correct, especially in IRA accounts. I've noticed missing transactions in the IRA accounts when money market shares are transferred from a traditional IRA to a Roth IRA. They are there in Q Win, but don't get transferred over to Q Mac (or maybe the transfer gets botched by the incorrect handling of money market funds in Q Mac).

jacobs

This was a change implemented by Schwab several months ago. See this announcement from the forum moderator:

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7907735/swvxx-value-advantage-money-market-fund-and-swgxx-schwab-government-money-fund

That said, I was under the impression that this was not a change specific to Quicken Mac; the announcement was for both Quicken Windows and Quicken Mac. 

I can't answer the why behind this change; it's caused a lot of confusion, and I think most Quicken users would prefer to see the money market funds represented as securities, not cash, in Quicken.

Tom Young

Over in the Windows world you can control how sweep funds are treated by clicking "Update cash balance..." and then ticking a button labeled "Cash Representation."  The Schwab Value Advantage Fund was being treated as readily available cash in my Quicken Accounts but I'd flipped the fund back to being a security.

Maybe something similar exists in the Mac versions?

jacobs

@Tom Young No, unfortunately, that functionality doesn't exist in Quicken Mac. 

Chris_QPW

BTW it isn't a "slam dunk" in Quicken Windows either.  I don't know what triggers the displaying of "Cash Representation" (probably something sent by the financial institution), but I have never had a financial institution where that was shown.  That includes for Fidelity, Vanguard, and Chase.

In general, all the advice I have ever seen on the Windows side is basically "don't fight whatever the financial institution is doing".  If they download it as a security (Vanguard does) then leave it that way.  If they don't download those transactions (Fidelity) just let it get the cash from the cash balance.

Since I don't have Quicken Mac I can't see if this problem is more than that, some of the descriptions of the problems sound like there are inconsistencies in how Quicken Mac displays things and that might be the complaint, and if that is true, I don't have anything to add to that.

Note that whether it is cash in the account or downloaded as a security, that security is always a "cash equivalent" security which when looking at the two in things like security asset allocations, they are in the same "group" (Cash) in Quicken Windows.

Dan R NC

@jacobs - Well, I guess I never saw that happen because I stopped downloading transactions from Schwab to Quick Windows. I got tired of having to reactivate accounts every_single_week.

And as far as "These are technically cash funds" is concerned, I don't buy that at all. They aren't "Cash" because Schwab will not take money out of the account when a Buy trade is made. As far as I know, a Sell of the SWVXX security has to be made by the account holder.

With this treatment, how am I supposed to fix historical transactions (as mentioned above) where shares of SWVXX were moved from a traditional IRA to a Roth IRA?

jacobs

Dan, don't get me wrong: I'm not arguing that it's a good thing Quicken combines the money market fund and cash in the account; I was just explaining that this is the way it now works, and the change was apparently pushed on Quicken by Schwab.

The only real downside I see is that in order to reconcile cash in a Quicken account to a Schwab statement, you have to add together the cash in the account and the value of the money market fund. Not optimal, but probably workable. 

Dan R NC said:

With this treatment, how am I supposed to fix historical transactions (as mentioned above) where shares of SWVXX were moved from a traditional IRA to a Roth IRA?

I don't have any Schwab accounts myself, so I'm not sure I understand what happened in the transition, and why it's now a problem. You can transfer cash from a traditional IRA account to a Roth IRA account in Quicken with a Payment/Deposit type transaction.

In fact, when I do this with my Vanguard accounts, I record a Sell transaction in the traditional IRA account to generate cash, a transfer transaction to move the cash to the Roth IRA account, and a Buy transaction to record the purchase of whatever security I buy in the Roth account. Even if I'm moving from a money market account in the traditional IRA account to a money market account in the Roth account, I do those three Sell - transfer - Buy transactions. If I didn't have my money market accounts at Vanguard as securities, it would just be a single transaction to transfer the cash from one account to the other. 

Dan R NC

Thanks for the tip Jacobs. Thanks to you I was able to get the two pair of IRA accounts straightened out. It seems odd that the routine Quicken uses to convert the Windows file into a Mac file couldn't figure out how to do that for me. At least it could have flagged there were some transactions that were ignored into the LOG file. That would have been helpful. Oh well.

jacobs

@Dan R NC Well, I'm glad you were able to sort it out and get your Quicken Mac accounts operable. Welcome to the Mac side! There's definitely a bit of a learning curve for some of the things Quicken Mac does differently than Quicken Windows. You'll likely find there are some things you could do in Quicken Windows which you can't in Quicken Mac, and some which Quicken Mac actually does better. The feature gap is closing, but it's a long, slow slog.

Dan R NC

Thanks @jacobs. Yes, QMac is different. If I continue with it, it will definitely take getting used to not having a customized Home page like I do on QWin with charts of different views of my financial world. It would be nice if there was a way to customize things a little more, like order of accounts, charts with "normal" increments on the value axis (not 1/10th of the maximum value). Maybe those are all niceties that aren't really necessary. I'll be excited to discover things it does better ("simplified" _is_ better in some ways ). We'll see how it goes.

jacobs

Dan R NC said:

It will definitely take getting used to not having a customized Home page like I do on QWin with charts of different views of my financial world.

The developers have indicated a customizable Home page is planned. When? We never know when plan features are slated to appear. (You can see this Idea thread, where the developers have given it the rare designation of "Planned." So at least there's hope on this one. )

Dan R NC said:

It would be nice if there was a way to customize things a little more, like order of accounts…

This is a popular request, and the developers have flip-flopped about their plans. Originally, they marked this Idea for alphabetical sorting as "Planned", but then reversed themselves and said it would cause other problems and that they no longer plan to implement it. But it says they are "working on possible custom grouping in the future."

So someone started a new Idea thread specifically to "Add an option to re-order accounts in the sidebar." I'd encourage you to click that link and add your vote for this feature request. (In the yellow box under the first post, click the little dark gray arrow to register your vote.)

In the meantime, one thing I do to keep me from being constantly upset with this is to add a numeric prefix to some of my account names, so I have some -- but not complete -- control over the order. You can't move accounts outside their account group, but you can order them within their account group. So I might have:

1-Marriott Bonvoy Visa
2-Hilton Amex
3-TJX Mastercard
4-Lowes

or 

1-Visa (Marriott)
2-Amex (Hilton)
3-Mastercard (TJX)
4-Lowes

Dan R NC said:

…charts with "normal" increments on the value axis (not 1/10th of the maximum value)…

There are multiple Idea threads about the scaling of charts in Quicken Mac. The top vote getter at this time, I believe, is this one. There's also this one. I suggest you add your vote for either or both. I think the developers have been generally more focused on adding missing features than refining features which already exists to work better, but voting for and commenting on these threads can help get them pushed up the priority list. 

Dan R NC said:

Maybe those are all niceties that aren't really necessary.

I'd say that's probably true; you can likely get your transactions and reports you need as the program currently exists. But "niceties" to better fit the way you want to work are certainly helpful when the developers get to implementing them. 


Best wishes exploring and getting used to Quicken Mac! Try to resist the temptation to repeatedly say "but this works better in Quicken Windows!" or "why is this different?", and to work with the program as best you can. You'll either find its limitations too much to tolerate and decide to continue using Quicken Windows, or you'll find that you can get by well enough despite some of the limitations and missing features. I think most former Quicken Windows users fall into the latter camp, but we all use Quicken differently, so only you can answer for yourself whether Quicken Mac can meet your needs.

Dan R NC

Thanks for that lengthy reply. I will look into some of those idea threads and cast my vote.

Right now, I'm trying to figure out the best way to fix what I have done. I've downloaded transactions from my bank and there are now a lot of mismatched and unmatched transactions. Fortunately it only goes back a month or two. Mac is a lot different than what I was used to in QWin. No little window with the downloaded transactions showing what is matched or not. I've tried dragging and dropping transactions to match them up like I read in a support topic, but no luck. All I get is a light gray circle with a slash through it, basically saying, "Yeah, no, that ain't working dude."

I know I'm getting way off-topic here, so I need to start a new discussion thread to just get in touch with Support.