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How to handle Schwab Privately Managed Fund in Q for Windows

MarieBaumann

Does anybody have a privately managed fund (sort of like a private mutual fund) in a Schwab brokerage account? , If so, do you add it to your accounts in Quicken? If not, how do you track it? I recently set up this new account with Schwab. It holds hundreds of investments. I do not want to track the individual investments in the account because, obviously, it would be an enormous task. But I DO want to track for purposes of net worth, at a minimum, its value in the aggregate, not individually and have that show up in my account list. I've tried numerous ways just to set up an outside account that I can make manual entries in, but nothing fits the bill.

On another note, I still haven't recovered from the Schwab Government Fund cash transactions fiasco, that download from Schwab. I hate this change. After more than a year, my cash balances still aren't right. I've been deleting every Gov. Money Fund transaction in the downloads, but alas. I'm accepting that cash balances will never be right, and ok with having the investment balances correct.

Help with either of these, please!

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Accepted answers

Tom Young

I'd say the creation of the account at Schwab, the transfer of securities from other Schwab accounts, and then the sales of those securities could be modeled perfectly in an offline manual Quicken "Privately Managed Fund" Account. And that would give you the cash in that Quicken Schwab Privately Managed Fund Account to buy the pseudo security and get started. I do sort of think that trying to match, transaction for transaction, what's going on in the real world account might be a chore, even if the transactions download into the Quicken Account, (do they?) and there is a hard upper limit of how many securities Quicken can handle.

If the month end report provides dividend information - all "reinvested" I'd think - you could enter this as a month end "cash" dividend from the pseudo security and a month end "buy" of the same number of shares as the dollar amount total cash. The "purchase price" to use here would take a bit of figuring, assuming this is the last entry of each month. The purchase price used would be the "quote" that you'd use to get the new, increased number of shares (now, all the cash you put in upfront and new cash from dividends) times the quote to balance to the total value per the Schwab statement.

If this account at Schwab is "new to you", which I guess it is, you might want to hold off for the first month, just to get an indication of how many transactions are going on in the account and try to gauge what your best course of action might be.

All comments

Tom Young

Maybe you can provide a little background of how this sort of account at Schwab works in a "mechanical" sense? For example, do you fund the account with cash, or can or do you fund it with securities you already own? And what kind of reporting does Schwab provide to you - monthly I'd assume - and at what level of detail?

Assuming that simply keeping track of the Account in Quicken for Net Worth Purposes is sufficient, it seems like you could create a pseudo "security" in a new Account that you "buy" when the account at Schwab is funded; "X" number of shares equal to the opening balance times $1 per share, then periodically update the "quote" to bring the value of the Account to the amount that's Schwab's reporting to you.

I haven't had to go through the "authorization" process with Schwab for a while so I may not be remembering this correctly, but it seems that as part of the re-authorization process you're asked how you want your money market fund (Schwab Value Advantage in my case) treated. As "cash" or as a "security."

MarieBaumann

Hi Tom, first, I did specify the MMF to be treated as "cash" but it never worked. Disabled and reenabled my Schwab accounts several times to try this. Sigh!

The Schwab Private Index brokerage account was funded through journaled transfers of securities from another Schwab brokerage account (managed by my wealth advisor), then sold and new securities bought. It is managed as a separate fund. The reporting is the same as any other brokerage account at Schwab.

I had the same idea as you of creating a fake account. Tried just "buying" the initial account value, but Q doesn't like that there is no account to "buy" from. Hadn't thought to record fake "shares" to get a grand total each month. Maybe that would work. It would also be nice to be able to track dividends (as dividends, not shares) to see dividend totals for tax planning, but that may be asking too much.

I think maybe I should bite the bullet and accept (one by one!) all the new securities when I have an hour or two to devote to it and hope that there aren't too many transactions each month! I read a few posts about folks having thousands of entries in a data file, which sometimes can slow down the program. If that happens, they suggest moving old, closed-out accounts, to a new data file.

Thanks for your thoughts!

Tom Young

q_lurker

I am wondering if the Simple Investing mode of account management within Quicken would be sufficiently helpful. That would still track the value of all the securities within the account but not the daily transactions that can be occurring.

Other than that, the pseudo-security approach would likely be best. At the simplest level, I would look at Adding or Buying 1 (or 100 or 1000) shares and updating the price to fit the market value weekly, monthly, quarterly as frequently as you might choose. But that very simple approach prevents Quicken from helping with any tax-related considerations.

Another option would simply as cash. Vary the amount with Cash Transferred in/out transactions that use the same account for the ‘transfer account’. That use makes the cash appear or disappear without a trace.

MarieBaumann

Thanks, everyone, for your thoughts. The workarounds were too fussy, so (1) I transferred all the securities from my first Schwab brokerage account that were the initial "deposit". Those securities were then sold in the new Indexing account to provide cash for new buys. (2) I accepted all the (many) "Buys" of new stocks and can download transactions in the account. So it now works as a regular investment account. Happy Financial New Year, and may Quicken treat you kindly!