Brokerage cash balance Mac v Win

Question

I recently moved from Win deluxe to Mac deluxe, both subscriptions. Windows program showed Brokerage Accounts and a corresponding "Cash" account which was located under "Checking" on the accounts column and showed cash balance for the brokerage account.  Moving to the Mac has worked well, except that none of my Brokerage accounts are communicating with the corresponding "Cash" accounts.

Primary brokerage is Fidelity.  The cash accounts are picking up dividend deposits from investments but not showing the "Fidelity Government Money Market" deposits any longer.  Everything shows up in the Brokerage account section.

The Win version worked better in this regard, but the user interface with Mac is much nicer!

jacobs · Answer

to make your Investment accounts more "cash like"…

@John_in_NC's suggestion is correct and fine for accomplishing the work of a cash account within a Quicken Mac investment account. But it doesn't address the problem @mevans wants solved: the ability to see cash in investment accounts in the left sidebar as if they were separate cash/checking accounts. As @Jon says, this can't be done in Quicken Mac. But the cash value held within investment accounts can be seen in several different ways…

* In Portfolio view, with filters set to Portfolio Value and By Security, the last line in the table of securities is Cash.
* In Dashboard view, Cash is visible in the Holdings card (at the bottom).
* In Dashboard view, Cash is visible in the Allocation by Security card (alphabetically as "Cash") if the cash balance is within the top 25 holdings which are shown in that card.

Note that this applies when you select a single account or multiple account group (e.g. all Brokerage, all Retirement all Investing accounts) or a selected subset of any account groups. So while cash isn't visible in the sidebar as a faux-separate account, the cash balance can be viewed with an extra click or two.

And that all said, there is a long-standing Idea request in this forum for the ability to have accounts linked to brokerage accounts — and it has been denoted by the developers as a "Planned" future feature …

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7310443/add-ability-to-link-accounts-to-brokerage-accounts-to-quicken-for-mac-104-legacy-votes

John_in_NC · Answer

Ignoring the potential conversion to Quicken Connect issues for Fidelity (which will likely get worked out), to make your Investment accounts more "cash like":

Choose to show the various columns you find pertinent (such as check #, Description/Category, Tags, etc.) visible. Drag the column headers around to reorder in a manner that suits you best.

The key is that every cash transaction must have a "Type" of "Payment/Deposit". This will allow cash transactions such as writing/printing checks, scheduled transactions (aka Bill Reminders), transfers in/out of account, etc. all within the brokerage account.

Chris_QPW · Answer

I haven't used Quicken Mac, but I have a different opinion of Quicken Windows "Show cash in a checking account" option.  It was put in because of a limitation in Quicken Windows.

In Quicken Windows "investment registers" started out as "investment lists" and to this day they still refer them that way.  Basically, instead implementing a robust investment register Quicken Windows "investment register" was built up in not so ideal a manner.  If you look at some of the investment actions you can even see that they made some attempt at doing checking account kinds of operations in the investment register, but never really followed through.  This hodgepodge not only resulted in an investment register that couldn't handle checking account operations, but it also resulted in a poor performing investment register.  The "virtual checking account" was their workaround.  Just like a more recent workaround was that because they couldn't do a decent multiple select in that hodgepodge register, instead if you want to edit multiple transactions you select Edit Transactions from the menu, and it pops up a window so that you can do the multiple select there.

And I should point out what is really happening with this virtual checking account.  The downloading of transactions is to the investment account, but when it sees a "cash transaction" it pushes it to the virtual checking account.  The information coming from financial institution isn't a brokerage account and a checking account, it is one brokerage account.

As I understand it, Quicken Mac was designed to allow "checking functions" in the investment account, which is a much better approach.

With all that being said I will go back to the original problem.

Primary brokerage is Fidelity. The cash accounts are picking up dividend deposits from investments but not showing the "Fidelity Government Money Market" deposits any longer. Everything shows up in the Brokerage account section.

My guess would be that this has nothing to do with Quicken Mac and everything to do with the fact that Fidelity is trying to change over to a different connection type and it isn't going well.  There are very long Windows threads talking about this problem.  If anything, it seems that Quicken Mac is handling some of this better just based on the less amount of complaints.

At this point I believe the migration to the new connection type has been put on hold.  It is at least for Quicken Windows.