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simple/complete tracking and linked checking

Jeanne

I decided to switch to simple tracking of investments because I'm using another program for investments. However, it looks like purely cash transactions are hitting the linked checking accounts but dividends/interest are lost. This is quite different from skipping share transaction detail.

Assuming I understand this, is a tremendous gap in documentation. Very unfriendly. Happily, the question arose in my mind almost immediately and I will soon restore from backup in order to reverse course for the two brokerage accounts that have linked checking.

Is there something I'm missing or misunderstanding? Should I post this to some other forum to suggest improved documentation?

Thanks for any info,

Jeanne

Quicken Classic Deluxe (Windows)

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NotACPA

What you're reporting looks like a bug to me. Have you reported this to Q Support, via the link at the top of this page?

This forum is user-to-user support, not Q employees. If your issued is going to be looked into, and hopefully corrected, it needs to go to Q Support.

q_lurker

I see this as a ‘be careful what you ask for’ issue. Simple tracking in the broad sense only focuses on values, not transactions. Why should any cash transactions be treated differently - be they to buy a security, reflect a dividend received, or pay a credit card bill?

I agree the documentation should be clear with respect to how linked cash accounts are handled when Simple tracking is chosen.

NotACPA

@q_lurker I also considered what you've said … but since an LCA doesn't itself download transactions HOW should they happen with "Simple".

OR, should an LCA be dis-allowed when the brokerage acct is "Simple"? Seems like conflicting design specs to me … which is why I called it a bug.

Jeanne

Thanks to both of you for your input. I took the precaution of closing Quicken and re-opening in case it would make some small difference. It didn't.

Q_lurker, your logic is fine as far as it goes. But I don't believe linked checking accounts got much thought in the development of this function, and I think that users should be steered away from "simple" tracking in this case (which is pretty complex when you think about it). Here's why:

Neither the investment account window nor the checking account ledger has an "update now" choice. Indeed, it seems that the only way to update the account is thru One Step Update. This isn't huge, but neither is it documented (I think).
In the investment account window, UPDATE CASH directs you reconcile in the linked checking account ledger. The only way to do that would be to manually enter a dividend paid a few days ago but missing from the checking ledger after One Step Update. Some accounts have a lot of income entries and this would not be pleasant.
The investment account window reflects the cash balance on Fidelity's web site, so it disagrees with the linked checking ledger. I could only bring them into agreement by entering the dividend manually in linked checking. Again, a lot of entries would be no fun.

NotACPA, It seems more ill-conceived than buggy. But re your second comment: the linked checking account does download ETF transactions, auto-credits, bill payments, and check processing. [EDIT: I think this is true but I didn't let this run very long. So someone might correct this.] So it seems to me that it could download all cash transactions.

This reminds me that for people who depend on Quicken for tax reporting, there's a whole other world of reasons not to go to simple tracking. I'm a bit out of my depth at this point, but it seems worth mentioning.

Meaningful changes to the interface and documentation are really needed. I will see about passing this along to Q Support.

Cheers!

Jeanne

Jim_Harman

The dialog displayed when you switch to Simple mode is pretty clear, IMO:

Simple mode, whether you have a linked checking account or not, does not track investment income, except to the extent that it affects your cash or share balances.

[Added after further thought] But if the cash from the dividend does not increase the balance in the linked account, that sure sounds like a bug. Are you sure it is not a timing issue and the cash shows up a couple of days later?

NotACPA

" It seems more ill-conceived than buggy."

Design bugs are, at least in my book, still bugs.

And the LCA does NOT, itself, download anything. Do TOOLS, Account List and you'll notice that the "Transaction Download" column across from the LCA is blank and the "Last Download" column shows "Not Available".

LCA's don't download. Rather, the cash txn from the brokerage acct are "auto-magically" moved to the LCA

Jeanne

Thanks for the clarification, NotACPA. I've reversed course here so I cannot prove anything, but I did think some cash transactions get into the LCA ledger. So if that is so, it gets curiouser and curiouser: Why wouldn't you download all cash debits and credits? Why would you allow the two cash balances to differ? (No, Jim_Harman, no time difference—unless switching to Simple introduced some time difference. The dividend was a few days old and clearly effectuated on Fidelity's web site. But I cannot over-emphasize that I've reversed course, so I can't go double-check anything.)

And if the problem resides at the brokers, Quicken at least needs to let us know.

Meanwhile, it is hard to figure out how Quicken welcomes this sort of feedback or suggestions. I'm not keen on explaining something like this via phone. Chat only gets you to a bot that cannot handle it. Not encouraging. And not a good sign for Quicken. Even some very very big names have been felled by competitors when they get out-of-touch enough. Quicken needs a page, here or elsewhere, for users to post feedback/suggestions. They don't need to be more responsive, but it would create the right impression (if you get my drift).

Thanks to three of you however, once again.

Jim_Harman

Inside Quicken, you can go to Help > Report a Problem and enter the details there. You will not get any response and unless a problem is widespread, your report may not get much attention.

Fidelity NetBenefits accounts have had a problem for years with Simple mode where the account balance is double what it should be, but despite many reports, there has been no resolution.

q_lurker

Inside Quicken, you can go to Help > Report a Problem and enter the details there. You will not get any response and unless a problem is widespread, your report may not get much attention.

I believe it effective to include a link to the community discussion in the Report-a-problem submission.

Jeanne

This is a Fidelity USA account, an ordinary brokerage account with linked checking. But things looked the same in the Merrill Lynch CMA account (the same kind of animal) in my limited experience.

I will try the link inside Quicken and definitely include a link to this thread. I certainly have no interest in re-typing much of this beyond a very succinct topic sentence.

Thanks again.

Jeanne

»[Jim_Harman] Simple mode, whether you have a linked checking account or not, does not track investment income, except to the extent that it affects your cash or share balances.»

For anyone still curious… I'm just adding to my observations and nobody is obliged to continue.

I left simple tracking on the retirement accounts. No linked checking and I'm not really using Quicken to manage them and don't need detail on each dividend in Quicken. Interestingly, the Fidelity IRA had a money market position, but Merrill Lynch's had neither cash nor money market. So I suspect that the brokers are part of the problem. (Surprise!)

But now when I click UPDATE CASH, I'm just invited to enter my cash balance. I figured maybe Quicken would update after I established a cash position. I still got the same dialog box. With both brokers — where I entered an initial cash position and where Quicken already had a cash position — I still got the same dialog box to plug in my cash position manually.

So there are people who only care about shares and values, but cash is not important enough to verify online? And how does this jibe with my experience yesterday where the cash position was the same as the one on Fidelity's web site but linked checking was off? How long would the cash position in the brokerage window remain in sync with Fidelity? I'll never know.

I may yet reverse course on the retirement accounts as well.

All best,

Jeanne

Chris_QPW

I don't fully understand what is going on here given this statement, so I'm going to ask/talk about this a bit more and may be just missing something:

I decided to switch to simple tracking of investments because I'm using another program for investments. However, it looks like purely cash transactions are hitting the linked checking accounts but dividends/interest are lost. This is quite different from skipping share transaction detail.

Simple mode does one thing, in the downloaded transaction information there is a "positions/cash" summary section. Quicken uses that to set the number of shares for each security, and the cash balance.

"Dividends" shouldn't go "missing", but they shouldn't be recorded as "dividends" either.

Example: I have a security set to reinvest dividends, then what should happen is the number of shares for the security goes up.

Second example: I have a security set not to reinvest dividends, then what should happen is the cash balance should go up.

In either case, I can't pull up a report to see what dividends were paid like I might with using the complete mode.

As far as bugs go, the main one that has been reported is when the account type is a 401K/403b and certain financial institutions, people are seeing that the cash balance shown is the total amount of the account instead of just the real cash balance, basically doubling the value of the account.

Since the complete mode works off of the transactions, and the simple mode works off of the "summary" it is very possible for them to be wrong because of either the financial institution isn't sending the right information (say the correct in the transactions and not in the summary) or Quicken could be processing the data wrong. Given that for the most part the "summary cash amount" wasn't used by most people until the simple mode was created, it certainly hasn't been "checked out" as much as the transaction information (which in fact has never been 100% correct at all financial institutions).

PER

I am a long time Quicken user and have multiple dividend focused portfolios. I eventually had to switch to Simple for all investment accounts as the number of transactions that occur daily became overwhelming. I also found the program would grind to a snail pace trying to reconcile on some days with 20 or 30 investment transactions that were merely dividend transactions. Throw in some covered call option writing and that blows up the security list since each option month increases the number of securities. I still like Quicken as a holistic checkbook of all accounts, but no longer use it for investment tracking. I have found as a dividend investor SimplySafeDividends far better in helping me monitor my accounts, give me concise news information pertaining to my holdings, and accurately predict current and future income streams. Most importantly SimplySafeDividends helps me know the safety of each holding as it pertains to the payment of the dividend. The combination of the two is what works for me.

Chris_QPW

@PER I think the super users have all agreed from day one that Quicken was never a good tool for frequent traders. I think the main bottleneck is actually the investment register itself the GUI. But when you start talking about calls and things like that and you're having lots of different securities and security lots it just wasn't designed for it All the way down into the database level. It was designed in an era where they're traditional investor that they were targeting would have been using a 401k and maybe even getting statements went to quarter.

Jeanne

As long as we're mentioning other tools, I'll add that I switched to Fund Manager for managing investments a few years ago. Still, I like having my investment accounts in Quicken since I open it more often and it shows me my larger financial universe and it alerts me to activity so I can take a closer look as needed. I'd like a little less clutter and complication, but Simple mode is not the answer.