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Fighting automatic Balancing Cash Adjustment entries in an account with money market funds as cash

whitenack

Hey all, I have a confusing set of things going on in one account. I need some help to sort them out.

I have an Edward Jones account that I have had for several years. I have it set up to download transactions. A few years ago, EJ started recording the money market fund purchases as the cash balance…before that, it hadn't…it was just the cash balance. However, when it made this switch, it evidently didn't record the initial switch to money market, because I have both a money market share balance and a cash balance. Whenever I try to make a manual entry to convert the cash balance to the money market fund, Q adds a balance adjustment entry to plug the cash balance back in. So, I have this connected issue where I can't convert my cash balance to the money market funds because Q keeps forcing me to have a cash balance. Then, whenever I have money market fund transactions, my cash balance changes.

Not sure if that is understandable. There is an example below of the first set of entries when the money market fund showed up in the download

1 - starting cash balance $872.15

2 - Withdrawal - $41.12 - Cash Balance = $831.03

3 - Sold - MNY MKT FUND - $41.12 ; share balance = -41.12 ; Cash Balance = $872.15

If I try to go up before the withdrawal and make an entry to buy 872.15 shares of the money market fund (which would make the share balance correct and bring the cash balance to $0), Q makes a balance adjusting entry to put $872.15 back in my cash balance.

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Accepted answers

Boatnmaniac

Yes, Placeholders can contribute to cash and shares imbalances so fixing them can sometimes resolve them. If, however, EJ's process does involve downloading the Settlement fund value as Cash instead of as MMF shares then the issue will return.

BTW, I almost never accept Quicken generated cash balancing transaction suggestion. That is because if the cash amount is not accurate it is often an indication that there is something else in the account that is not correct and that needs to be fixed.

…I would prefer not to have to deal with all the money market/cash entries each month. If there is an easy way to stop that, that would be preferred.

There is no way to do that in Quicken. There are things that can be done prevent such issues from occurring when the investment company does download the Settlement fund as cash. If you want, you can read up on this some more in this post thread: Downloads from Fidelity do not included activity into the settlement fund .

whitenack

Thanks for the reply.

All comments

Boatnmaniac

Some investment companies download the dollar value of the Settlement fund (or as Fidelity calls it, the Core Account) MMF as cash instead of as shares. There can be some situations where it will download both but, at least with Fidelity, there are things that can be done to prevent that from happening. It sounds like this is perhaps what EJ is doing, as well.

Go to Account Register > upper right Gear icon > Reconcile Shares. What pops up up?

Click on the blue font Cash Balance below the register on the right. What pops up?

whitenack

Thanks for the reply.

Reconcile Shares = "Securities Comparison Mismatch" dialogue box pops up, showing the difference in shares reported and shares in quicken for this fun (among others…working to get all of this cleaned up)

Cash Balance = "Update Cash Balance" dialogue box pops up, allowing me to make changes to cash balance.

I figured out my initial probably was stemming from a placeholder entry line further down the register. After deleting that, I was able to make the entries manually without any trouble. So now I think I am able to do what I need to do to clean up the account, but I would prefer not to have to deal with all the money market/cash entries each month. If there is an easy way to stop that, that would be preferred.

Boatnmaniac

…I would prefer not to have to deal with all the money market/cash entries each month. If there is an easy way to stop that, that would be preferred.

whitenack

Thanks for the reply.