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Cash transactions being recorded as security transactions (Fidelity)

Pong Ching

I have a Fidelity investment account and it's been setup as cash account and investment account in quicken. Fidelity has a default settlement fund for the cash account. Transactions for the settlement fund has always been recorded in the cash account.

However, the latest Quicken update start to record the transactions for the settlement fund as investment transactions. This only happened after the latest quicken update. This is definitely a bug.

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Quicken Kristina

Hello @Pong Ching,

Since this issue started immediately after the last Quicken update, the first thing we would want to check is if the update may have caused a file specific issue. Please restore a backup from before your Quicken program updated and test to see if the issue still happens in the newly restored file.

Please let me know how it goes!

mshiggins

The ability to treat money market funds as cash is an option and it's only available if the financial institution agrees to provide it.

Normally the option to treat mm funds as cash is offered to the user when the account is "activated" for downloading.

Usually, if your mm fund transactions are no longer being treated as cash; I would suggest you deactivate the account(s) for downloading, then use the Quicken "Add Account" process to reactivate the account(s). At the end of the Add Account process, you should be offered the option ("Cash Representation") to treat mm funds as cash.

But in my testing (in R55.26), I was never offered the option to choose "Cash Representation" for Fidelity. I tried deactivating/reactivating an existing Fidelity account - even tried creating a New Quicken file and setting up the Fidelity account in that New file. In neither case was I offered the option of choosing "Cash Representation".

I can't say whether this is a Quicken problem, a Fidelity problem, or a new Fidelity policy (I have never chosen to represent mm funds as cash, so I can't say how Fidelity has worked in the past).

I don't know whether Quicken Support would have any helpful information on the subject, but you can certainly try them.

You can also use Help > Report a Problem to notify Quicken developers of the issue.

[A related note:
I thought I would see what the online Quicken Knowledge Base has to say on the subject, so I went to the link below.

When I keyed "treat money market securities as cash" in the quicken.com Search box and pressed enter, I got
"Did you mean 'threat more march security as case'".

It appears as if Quicken hired "The Tower of Babel, Inc." to write their Search code.]https://www.quicken.com/search/site

-JP

Boatnmaniac

@Pong Ching - By "settlement fund", are you referring to a money market fund (MMF) that Fidelity also calls the Core Account?

Fidelity's standard practice since the early 2000's has been to download Core Account transactions as Cash but it has not been foolproof.

Dividends: If the setting in the online account at Fidelity is set to "Reinvest" the dividends will be downloaded by Fidelity as security shares transaction. If this is what you are seeing, then you need to change your setting in your online account for dividends to be deposited into the cash balance of the account.
When Fidelity sells shares of the Core Account MMF to fund buys of another security or to fund a distribution, Fidelity will sometimes download them as Sell transactions. This is an issue with how Fidelity downloads, not with Quicken. I have not found a way to stop that from happening and Fidelity's tech folks couldn't help me, either. So, when this happens I simply delete the transaction.

If the above does not address your issue: Please confirm the connection method you have set up with Fidelity Investments. Is it Direct Connect? Or is it Express Web Connect+? (You can see this above and to the left of the Account Register directly beneath the Account Name.) Fidelity's EWC+ connection is relatively new first becoming available this past Dec. Some Fidelity customers have been prompted to "reauthorize" their DC connection and when they do their connection is changed to EWC+. I thought this issue was resolved back in Dec/Jan but maybe it still sometimes happens?

If your account is now set up with EWC+ then that might be the issue because Fidelity's EWC+ connection does not play well with Complete Investing (where you have an account register and not the dashboard). The only fix for this is to deactivate the the Fidelity account and then do Add Account or Set Up Now with Fidelity Investments (not Fidelity - Investment & Retirement Accounts) to set DC as the connection method, again. NOTE: Changing the connection method might cause there to be some duplicate transaction entered into the account register. If you want some help regarding this process, let me know.

One other possibility: Sometimes when the installed Quicken version is updated, the update process will randomly change one or more Preferences. You might want to go to Edit > Preferences > Downloaded transactions > make sure the box for Never interpret downloaded Money Market funds as cash is not checked > OK. (If you find this box is checked, you might want to review all of your other Preferences to make sure nothing else was changed, as well.)