Is there a way to automatically use online cash balance for reconciling investment accounts?

adweathers

If you select "update cash balance" under account setting for an investment account, it will show both the register balance and the downloaded online cash balance. But if I select reconcile, I must manually enter the online balance. When reconciling, is there a way to automatically populate this field with the downloaded cash balance? There is a setting under "account details/online services" that allows you to select "reconcile using online balance", but this does not seem to have an effect for cash balance.

Chris_QPW

The answer is no. I did suggest that it should work that way, but it hasn't been changed.

What I do is have automatic compare to securities off (just so that it doesn't get in my way), and then have these three action buttons set up:

Reconcile Shares…

Update cash balance…

Reconcile…

After downloading and making sure the transactions are entered correctly and click the first one and expect it to tell me there isn't any differences in my shares. If there are I fix them.

Then I select the Update cash balance button, this might seem strange, but not only will it show you what the balance that your financial institution sent so that you can check it against what Quicken has, it also has a text box with the current value Quicken has. So, if this all lines up you can just copy it value out of the text box and use it for the last part where you bring up the Reconcile dialog and it wants the ending cash amount:

Chris_QPW

The answer is no. I did suggest that it should work that way, but it hasn't been changed.

What I do is have automatic compare to securities off (just so that it doesn't get in my way), and then have these three action buttons set up:

Reconcile Shares…

Update cash balance…

Reconcile…

After downloading and making sure the transactions are entered correctly and click the first one and expect it to tell me there isn't any differences in my shares. If there are I fix them.

Then I select the Update cash balance button, this might seem strange, but not only will it show you what the balance that your financial institution sent so that you can check it against what Quicken has, it also has a text box with the current value Quicken has. So, if this all lines up you can just copy it value out of the text box and use it for the last part where you bring up the Reconcile dialog and it wants the ending cash amount:

adweathers

@Chris_QPW, thanks! This helps a lot. Previously I was going to the website to get the cash balance. This saves time. But I am curious, what was the issue you had with leaving the security comparison as automatic.

Chris_QPW

Well, it is really "Chase thing". When I buy or sell securities the "cash" goes through like three different "hidden accounts", which sort of show up as securities. QACDS, QDEQ, and US DOLLAR. I can only tell Quicken to deal with one of these as cash. But even more important is that they update these balances, but there aren't any actual transactions sent to Quicken.

Bottom line is that just after a buy or sell until the it actually closes one or more of the above will "not compare". The "automatic compares" tend to popup up at inconvenient times. So, I just turn them off and one click of the Reconcile shares button does the same thing. If the not compare is one of the above, I know it is still OK and will resolve itself when it finally closes.