Treating Money Market Balances as cash

HDKapadia

I am getting tired of manually adding buy/sell transactions for the default money market funds on my accounts and would like to convert all those accounts to treat it as cash. How do I do that in Quicken for Mac?

jacobs

Please share more details. What brokerage company? Are you downloading transactions from them, or entering everything manually? Walk us through what you're doing and what happens.

HDKapadia

Thanks for your quick response. I am a 25+ year user of Quicken and have many investment accounts all of which are downloaded automatically. Some of them already treat money market funds as cash which is great. However my downloads from Northwestern Mutual don’t download mutual fund transactions so I’ve been manually adding just those transactions for the past 3 years. My question is regarding how I change those to treat money market funds as cash so I don’t have to manually add those transactions. Thanks.

jacobs

There's no setting you can change in Quicken about how it enters downloaded transactions. If I understand correctly, you do download fromNorthwestern Mutual, and transactions download successfully, except you get no download of money market transactions at all. (That seems weird, but it is what it is.) I'm not quite sure what currently happens. If you sell shares of another security in this account, and the funds go into the Northwestern Mutual money market account, what transaction downloads? That is, if you receive a downloaded Sell transaction downloaded, it should result in an increase in the cash balance of the Quicken account — which seems to be what you want it to do. Do you not get the Sell transaction?

HDKapadia

Except for money market fund transactions, all other transactions for Sell and Buy download correctly. If I ignore these transactions, fund balances don’t reconcile when I Reconcile after a download.

jacobs

I'll still unclear on what's happening. If you sell $1,000 from XYZ Fund in this account, are you saying that no Sell transaction downloads, and you have to manually enter the Sell transaction to reduce your holding of XYZ Fund and increase your cash balance? Or are you saying that Sell from XYZ Fund downloads correctly and increases your cash, but if you Sell shares from your money market fund, nothing downloads in Quicken? When you sell shares of the money market fund, what happens in the real world? Is there a cash component in your Northwestern Mutual account? Or did the money out of the money market fund get transferred to some other account?

HDKapadia

Hi Jacobs, Let me provide a bit more detail. If it’s a normal stock or fund, then Buy and Sell transactions show up correctly. However, if it’s the sweep fund which is a money market fund, then no transactions show up and I have to manually enter the purchase or sale of that money market fund, otherwise during reconciliation the balances won’t match. For context, here’s a thread from someone asking to do the OPPOSITE of what I want to do, and the response refers to an option that I don’t see:

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7907053/switch-money-market-fund-back-from-cash-to-mutual-fund

jacobs

The thread you referenced is about Quicken Windows and doesn't apply to Quicken Mac.

If I'm understanding correctly, you're doing a Sell (or Buy) in your money market fund and the transaction doesn't download. What I'm still trying to understand is if you have the sweep money market fund and a separate cash balance in this account? In most brokerage accounts, there is one or the other, not both. And if you don't have a separate cash holding in addition to the sweep money market, then I'm trying to understand where the money goes in these transactions where you're selling shares of the money market fund. If I could fully understand the transactions, I could perhaps give better advice, if there is any alternative to doing what you're doing.

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It's hard to know here whether the culprit is Northwestern Mutual for not sending the correct Sell transactions to Quicken, or Quicken (or Intuit, which handles the connectivity) suppressing the money market transactions because it thinks they're already cash.

Does Northwestern Mutual's website give you a way to download transactions in QFX or Quicken format? If so, try downloading a file for a period which includes one of the money market Buy or Sell events. Don;t import it into Quicken yet, as it would duplicate your existing transactions. But you can open it in TextEdit and scroll through to determine if the Buy/Sell transaction is present or not. If not, then you can pursue this with the financial institution's support, as they aren't sending all the transactions. On the other hand if the transactions are present in the download file, then it's a Quicken (or Inuit) problem.