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Deposit Accounts vs. Cash

jerrylcanterbury

I have used Quicken since the 1990s so am pretty competent but something new has cropped up and I'm wondering the best way to address it.

My investment accounts sometimes have a cash balance. For this particular account, that balance is $594.53. That worked well enough.

In the past week, that cash balance has started to be reported as shares in a separate deposit account.

If I create a placeholder to have the message go away, I'm now double counting that cash on hand. If I ignore for now, I believe I'll just get the same error message when I download again.

Any thoughts on the best way to address this cash-related issue?

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q_lurker

Assuming your Quicken records are showing properly the $594 as cash in your account, I see 2 basic options:

Ignore the warning (which will continue) since you know and like the way this has been handled, or
Create a UBS Bank Deposit security and buy shares of that at $1 per share. Going forward, you would continue to buy and sell shares at $1 as the cash balance fluctuates.

jerrylcanterbury

Thanks, those are some good ideas. Here are some thoughts:

For solution #1, I have multiple investment accounts where this is happening, so a bit cumbersome to click "Ignore" anytime there's a download.

For solution #2, that would definitely work and be technically correct too. But it adds an extra manual step anytime a dividend changes my cash balance (which is what most often causes the change).

q_lurker

For #2 to work effectively, UBS needs to send those buy&sell transactions which your second error warning says they did not do. That is on UBS, so maybe talk to them.

There is a setting under preferences for downloaded transactions about Compare account portfolio where that check can be omitted for selected accounts. I would say that option is not described accurately in that the comparison offers to create placeholders which is what you are seeing. Whether you want to turn that off for this or other accounts would be your call perhaps considering how frequently changes are made to securities or share counts. Risk of missing something versus cost of the extra clicks.

splasher

My brokerage does a similar thing with what used to be "cash", it is now in a Money Market account and they move the cash into it as it is created automatically and in Quicken it happens via their download, so no extra work for me.

I would try #2, create the account and see if the next "cash" download is included as a buy in that account. Be patient though, my brokerage does the MM buy the following day, so I never see the "cash" earned and MM buy transactions on the same day. Same goes with when they sell the MM funds to cover a buy, they don't show up on the same day either.

If it doesn't work out, you can always delete the transactions/account and try something else.

q_lurker

@splasher You said “create an account “. I had suggested creating a security to be used within the existing account. Does your FI want or expect the cash to process as a wholly separate account?

splasher

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20466626#Comment_20466626

I agree with you, it is a security at my brokerage, but I was just using the terminology and wording used in the screenshots.

Chris_QPW

For what it is worth, I get "mismatches" for "cash/securities that are used for cash" all the time with Chase. The reason is because Chase doesn't keep these "in sync". I used to get a similar result on Vanguard. They correct themselves a day or so later. Chase has a pretty complicated system for "cash". It has securities, for "your cash", for "in progress of a buy/sell". So, there isn't even just one security used for "cash".

Note that this is really a different subject than cash vs security. Different financial institutions do it differently. Some will not send any transactions for the moving of the cash in and out of the security that they use for "cash", and as such using the Quicken cash balance is the way to go. Others like Vanguard will send the transactions for the buying and selling of the "cash security" that is being used (but with the summary information that Quicken uses for the security compare out of sync). And in that case, it is best to just accept the buy/sell transactions and have no Quicken cash balance.

Note in some cases, you might actually get a choice. I'm not sure what the financial institution sends, but sometimes you will get Quicken asking you if you want to treat the security as cash or not. Note that there is also a preference in Quicken in the Downloaded transactions section that says, "Never interpret downloaded Money Market funds as cash". I'm not sure where that even comes in since from what I have seen when Quicken will let you make that choice, it prompts you and then remembers that choice on an account-by-account basis (maybe it just hides that prompting).

FredC

I know that I'm intruding on the Windows side, but I'm seeing almost the same thing on my Mac and stumbled into this thread as I was troubleshooting. Like the OP, it's happening with my UBS accounts. I have been on Quicken for Mac for 4 years and updating UBS accounts on Quicken for Windows for almost 20 years before that. I have never seen this before.

Like the OP, Quicken is establishing "shares" for each cash dollar in each investment account. In my case, a placeholder transaction is being created automatically in each investment account to represent one share for each cash dollar currently in the account. These placeholders are inflating the value of each account. When I delete the placeholder, everything reconciles nicely.

Coincidentally with the OP, this started with me on Dec 13. Still pondering whether this is a Quicken issue or UBS issue…

Chris_QPW

@FredC I would expect that if it was a Quicken problem it would show up on all financial institutions using the same connection type. What's the fact that it shows up in both Quicken Windows and Quicken Mac and neither of these programs have had any updates, they it has to be something "upstream" from the actual Quicken program. Note that would include Quicken Inc's servers and Intuit's servers and the financial institution, but I would expect most of the code for this for the Quicken Inc/Intuit servers to be "generic" and as such affect all financial institution using that connection type.

Recently Chase has been messing up the Online Balance (in non-investment accounts) and just as expected, eventually the moderators posted that Chase had indeed found the problem on their system (with no ETA on the fix). And that is the general way these tend to go. One financial institution, it is probably on their side, more, then probably in Quicken (the program) or on the Quicken Inc/Intuit servers.

jerrylcanterbury

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20466783#Comment_20466783

I'm the OP. Mine started before that, but within the past week or so. I thought it might be a momentary blip that would correct itself, but it didn't.

FredC

@Chris_QPW, I agree. I'm reasonably sure that UBS owns this. There have been a couple of weird things that have happened on their end in recent weeks. I'll wait it out a while to see if anything changes. In the end, simply deleting the placeholder transactions may be easier than trying to take it up with UBS…

Chris_QPW

BTW even if it is UBS problems I would still contact Quicken support and try to get it escalated. They might be able to put a little pressure on UBS to fix the problem or at least make them aware that the problem exists.

Official Quicken® Support - Phone, Chat, or Community

jerrylcanterbury

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20466930#Comment_20466930

My experience with UBS technical support for Quicken was decidedly not a good one a couple of years ago.

Transactions stopped downloading completely. UBS tech support kept trying to tell me I had too much data downloading. Never mind that I downloaded at least a couple of times per week so there's no way I had that big of a backlog.

By happenstance, after weeks of trying to solve the problem, and hours online with Quicken Support, as part of my continued debugging (I have a tech background myself), I happened to restore a backup from before the problem began, and eureka! the problem went away. Apparently the file got corrupted around that time which broke the download process for UBS only. All of the missing data downloaded at once, so it certainly wasn't "too big".

Honestly, I should have thought on my own to go back and see what happened by restoring an old backup. But it's even more disappointing that neither Quicken or UBS suggested that either — because it's their JOB to have that option in their bag of tricks.

FredC

As I suspected might happen, my problem went away with today’s UBS download. Based on this and a couple of other (mostly benign) oddities, something is clearly going on at the UBS side. Case closed for me, at least for now…

jerrylcanterbury

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20467797#Comment_20467797

Unfortunately it's still happening for me on Windows. :(