Changing linked cash/checking accounts

gdhoffman7013

Right now, once an investment account has a linked separate cash/checking account that link can never be undone without all the associated transactions (e.g., dividends) being dumped back into the cash balance of the investment account. Once a new linked cash/checking account is established those dividends, etc, can be moved to the new account, but the original source of the money will be lost. With 20 years of transactions that will take forever and totally mess up my cash/checking account which is used for other purposes. Because of the establishment of a Trust for some of my assets I need to be able to change the investment account's original linked cash/checking account to another checking account but can not without the above happening.

SO, Quicken should make the breaking of one linked checking account and the establishment of another seamless, or close to it.

Chris_QPW

I don't understand why you are turning off the linked checking account in the first place, and in the second part I don't think it is possible to do what you are requesting.

First a linked checking account is a virtual account. All downloaded transactions are going to the investment account, but when the transactions are "cash transactions" they are pushed to the linked checking account. The whole purpose of this is to support checking like functions that the investment register was never setup to handle (side note Quicken Mac doesn't have linked checking accounts because their investment register can do the check functions).

So, as such it is quite possible to change financial institution information for the investment account without touching the linked checking account. The linked checking account knows nothing about such things.

On the second part about being able to remove the linked checking account and then putting it back without loss of information. I have seen lots of posts on here that make it sound like you can flip back and forth without a care. This is just plain wrong, and I find it interesting that Quicken doesn't even warn the user about doing this.

Let's look at that logic. If the investment account could hold all the information that the linked checking account can hold (like in Quicken Mac) then there would be no reason to have a linked checking account. By its very nature, in some cases there has to be a "loss of information" when pushing the transactions from the linked checking account back into the investment account.

gdhoffman7013

To Chris_QPW. In my case (above) this "virtual account" as you describe it is a real account. My Brokerage account uses a money market account as a sweep account for dividends, and dollars for stock purchases or sales. This I replicated within Quicken using the linked checking account, AKA my money market account. This MM account also serves as a repository for other investment money, and home expenses. Now I need to split that money market account in two, part inside and part outside a Trust. I need (want) to use the Trust MM account as the new linked account, but as described above this apparently can not be done without loss of information.

I strongly agree with you that Quicken should make it VERY obvious (in its next update) that the link established to a checking account from an investment account can never be broken without extreme loss of information. [Quicken, are you listening] If I knew that 20 years ago I would have set up accounts differently. That is hindsight, as for today I worked out away to fudge which account is actually inside or outside the trust. It does not match the real flow of dollars, but as long as I make good notes to this effect within Quicken I should be OK going into the future.