How do I make the cash balance in my Quicken investment account be $0.00?

David M Deitz

How do I make the cash balance in my Quicken investment account be $0.00?

jacobs

If you just want to make an adjustment to bring your cash balance to zero, without digging into why it's non-zero currently, you can enter a simple adjustment transaction. In the register, enter a new transaction, set Type=Payment/Deposit, use Category=Adjustment, and enter an Amount of negative the current cash balance to bring it to zero. This will make the cash disappear; it won't show up as income or expense on any reports.

However, as @Jon suggested above, you may want to explore why your balance is non-zero rather than just making it go away. Is it an amount in a money market fund? Do you have purchases or reinvestments which are not using up cash? Chances are if something isn't being entered properly into the account, it will continue to recur and you'll need to repeatedly make adjustments.

Jon

If the cash balance in your Quicken account is higher than it should be, double check your asset purchases to make sure they're reducing the cash balance by the correct amount (check the share price & number of shares purchased). And if you have reinvested dividends, make sure those are recorded correctly since they should not be increasing your cash balance.

Also, if you're downloading transactions from the brokerage, check to see if what's reported as cash is really your core position (which is probably some kind of money market fund).

David M Deitz

Jon- I have been using Quicken for many years to manage several investment accounts. Years ago before some type of update was done there was a simple "command" that you could do to restore your investment account "cash balance" to $0.00. Now there is a Reconcile account tab which I have tried to use several times but I can't figure out to make my balance $0.00. I always have either a negative or a positive cash balance which results in having an incorrect total value for the account. Any thoughts on this? Thanks.

David

jacobs

If you just want to make an adjustment to bring your cash balance to zero, without digging into why it's non-zero currently, you can enter a simple adjustment transaction. In the register, enter a new transaction, set Type=Payment/Deposit, use Category=Adjustment, and enter an Amount of negative the current cash balance to bring it to zero. This will make the cash disappear; it won't show up as income or expense on any reports.

However, as @Jon suggested above, you may want to explore why your balance is non-zero rather than just making it go away. Is it an amount in a money market fund? Do you have purchases or reinvestments which are not using up cash? Chances are if something isn't being entered properly into the account, it will continue to recur and you'll need to repeatedly make adjustments.

David M Deitz

Jacobs- Thank you. Your suggestion accomplished exactly what I was trying to do. I will dig into things and attempt to find out why this is happening.

David