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.

Ikebana

I, too, would NEVER have used the linked checking to investment accounts feature when I set up my Quicken file over 10 years ago if I had known 1) that there is no way to adjust the investment account balance which is always supposed to be zero but rarely is; and 2) there is no way to break break the link. I am a CPA and I understand timing differences. The discrepancies that I see in my investment account have nothing to do with timing differences. Quicken needs to fix this!

Chris_QPW

I must have missed this comment when it was posted a year ago:

To Chris_QPW. In my case (above) this "virtual account" as you describe it is a real account.

What is true in the real world has no impact on the "virtual account" (Show cash in checking account).

What is happening is that you have a connection to download the brokerage account. Then what Quicken does is look at each transaction, and if the transaction is a "cash transaction" it will push it to the virtual checking account. There isn't any direct connection with your checking account at the broker. Now the broker might be sending enough transactions through the brokerage account that the virtual account mirrors your real account, but they aren't the same at all. If you look at the virtual checking Account Details, you will see there isn't any way to actually connect that account to an online account.

And let me make something clear that might not have been clear in my original post. If you ask Quicken Support or even some of the SuperUsers on here, you might get "Switching back is easy, just change the setting in the Account Details", but what I was talking about above is my actual experience with it. Every time I tried it with any account that had good number of transactions, it messed up in some way or another.

To this day, people swear by using this feature. I personally dropped using it years ago, for this kind of problem and some of the others that have popped up with it over the years (some fixed later, others I'm not so sure about).

As for a "fix", given the new command to be able to move transactions between accounts, I would try it, select the gear icon in the brokerage account → Move Transactions, selecting to move just the open positions (definitely make sure you have a good backup before doing this, and you will need to create a new account to move the transactions into).

q_lurker

@Chris_QPW I appreciate you clarifying the issues with toggling the link on/off. I have been one of those saying it was easy to do. In doing so, I was more focused on the dollars being properly maintained and was not being mindful of the other details that would be lost in doing that. I'll be more cautious in the future.

Chris_QPW

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20471673#Comment_20471673

I really think that there should be a warning like they have when you’re switching between simple and complete investing mode. I haven’t tested all the different combinations, I just know it didn’t work for me. It strikes me as impossible to get 100% correct, because you can enter some kinds of transactions in the virtual checking account that can’t be represented in an investment account. Like maybe some combinations of splits. After all, if you could’ve entered all the transactions nicely into the brokerage account, why would you split it off in the first place? AlsoI have a feeling that there are some conversions that are possible that they don’t do right. The reason I have a feeling about that is because I didn’t do anything fancy in the checking account that I had and it’s still didn’t convert exactly right when I went back to having them all in the brokerage account.

I know that when they do the conversion from quicken windows to quicken Mac, this is always a sticking point. And in my opinion, they have a better chance of doing it, because quicken Mac actually allows regular checking account transactions in their investment. But there are certainly transactions I could think of that can’t be entered directly into a brokerage account in windows.