Automatic settings when entering investment transactions

RichJS

I have a 401K account. When I download transactions they get classified as bought. This however creates a negative cash balance. I have to go in manually and change them from bought to boughtx and then select my 401K account as the cash account. How can I make this automatically use boughtx?

Jim_Harman

Are you recording your 401k) contributions and company match, if any, as deductions from your paycheck that are transferred to the 401(k) account? Normally this cash would provide the cash used by the Bought transactions.

Quicken's Paycheck Wizard makes it easy to set up these and other deductions from your paycheck. 

RichJS

Yes, I'm recording the contributions and match as deductions from my paycheck. I agree, normally it would, and in fact it did it that way for years, then last year it stopped and just posts them as bought, with a negative impact on cash balance, instead of boughtx.

Tom Young

How is the Bought creating a "negative cash balance?"  If you have cash sitting in the 401(k) Account you do expect the buy to reduce the balance in the Account but, assuming you have as much or more cash than consumed in the purchase, it shouldn't drive the balance to a negative number.  It sounds like the cash in the Account is being affect by the purchase, but your workaround is to enter a BoughtX and tell Quicken to use the cash in the Account for the purchase?  I'm not getting a good mental picture of what's going on here.

Could you post a screenshot of what you're seeing to make the situation more clear?  If a simple Bought used to work fine it seems like it should continue working.

RichJS

I found out this had to do with when I edited my paycheck. Not sure but I think it has to do with how my contributions were marked. Essentially there was no account to take the money from so it deducted it from the account, vs using contributions.