Reconciling Fidelity Cash Management Account with online balance IN QUICKEN

Question

Like many others, I am using a Fidelity's Cash Management (CMA) account as a checking account, and in general, it works fine. I understand the concept of showing the cash portion of a Fidelity account as a checking account, and am not asking for instruction on setting that up.

All my traditional bank checking accounts download and display the online balance in the Quicken (Windows) register, and I can quickly ascertain that my records and the bank's are in agreement. Not so with a Fidelity CMA. I have to log in to Fidelity to see my CMA balance.

** Why can't Quicken and Fidelity work together to display a downloaded online cash balance for a CMA just like any other checking account? ** Is this an oversight, or is there a technical reason that this isn't done?

Thanks in advance for a well researched answer from someone at Quicken.

Chris_QPW · Answer

One has to realize that the "checking account" connected to an investment account is "virtual".

In other words, the downloads are really all for the investment account, and Quicken routes the "cash transactions" to the linked "checking account".  So, all the information it gets really follows the "investment account rules".

If you look at your investment accounts they don't report the online balance and you can't reconcile to it.
Therefore the linked checking account has the same restrictions.

It should be noted that the online cash balance is actually downloaded for investment accounts, but Quicken has never made use of that information for reconciling investment accounts.

There is one place where you can see this amount/balance, at least in investment accounts that aren't linked to a checking account which I haven't tested, but probably are the same.  In the investment account select the gear icon menu button and select "Update Cash Balance...".  You will get a dialog, and one of the pieces of information on it is what the cash balance download was.

Why they never made it possible to reconcile to the online balance in an investment account I don't know.