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Treating Morgan Stanley CashPlus as a money mgmt account instead of a brokerage

Jay Baker

Since investment accounts don't show up in Quicken Mobile, the budget showing there is always way off the real budget in Quicken Desktop. I know there is an option to use "Morgan Stanley - Cash Management" to get the CashPlus account to behave like a checking account and show up in the mobile budget, but that service seems flaky in that it's often unavailable for downloading.

So I'd like to see about how to get the same CashPlus account to connect, as a non-investment account, using what seems to be the more stable "Morgan Stanley Wealth Management" connection.

MS.pdf

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Chris_QPW

It can't be done. The financial institution determines the account type, and Brokerages can't have true checking accounts by law. I supposed a broker could "pretend" for sending the information to Quicken that it is a checking account, but not only would the account type have to be changed (and most likely for everyone, and not everyone wants this) but also the transaction types are different between a brokerage account and

Sceptic

@Jay Baker Even though brokerages cannot have true checking accounts, as Chris indicates, ML partners with BOA to offer CMA accounts. These CMA accounts act like checking accounts. I think the issue you might have is that CashPlus is not the same as CMA accounts, and cannot be treated as such.

NotACPA

ACTING like a checking account isn't the same as BEING a checking account.

If the account in question is held by ML, it CAN'T be a true checking account. But by using Q's "Show Cash …" function, a pseudo-checking account will be created that holds all of the cash transactions in the associated BROKERAGE account and this pseudo-account be a "checking" type account in Q.

IF, the account is actually held at BofA (which I kinda doubt), then it would be a true checking account and could be set up separately in Q.

Sceptic

CMA accounts are offered to brokerage clients who don't want to use a traditional bank for their day-to-day cash management needs. They are used as checking accounts and have the full capablity of a checking account through the partnership with a banking institution. Whether or not they are independently linkable to Quicken is dependent of the capabilities of the financial institution.

NotACPA

There are HIGHLY technical legal differences between a CMA "checking" account and an true checking account … some of which have to do with the unlikely, but possible (it HAS happened in the past), event of a MMF "breaking the buck" whereby a share is no longer worth exactly $1.00

And, since the pseudo-checking account created by "Show Cash …" doesn't really exist … it can't be independently connected to the FI.

Sceptic

I have several cash management accounts with my brokerage that show as checking accounts on Quicken. They show up as checking accounts with the partnered banking institution. If I want, I can write checks or withdraw cash from these accounts like any other bank account. I can connect to these accounts independently on Quicken. Yes, there may be legal differences between the two, but that makes no difference to the end-user experience on Quicken. And again, how well the accounts work on Quicken depends on the capabilities of the financial institutions involved.

Chris_QPW

Ok I think made a mistake bring up the fact that a broker cannot have a true checking account, but did say that they can pretend when sending to Quicken and opening that discussion.

So, let's get back on track.

The transactions the financial institution sends when they are treating the account as an investment account are different then they are treating it as a checking account, even if all the translations are cash.

So, when you first connect the account they announce how they are going treat it. If they say investment you can't force it to a checking account because the transactions are wrong and Quicken doesn't know if a pure investment transaction will be sent The compromise Quicken gives in this case is the "use linked checking account" setting that you said you don't want to use.

What is going with that setting is that the transactions come in as investment transactions in the investment account and if they are cash transactions they are changed to what they would be in a checking account and pushes them to the linked checking account.

If and only if the broker decides to treat it like a straight checking account the you can select that account type in Quicken. And I might add that if they made that choice you wouldn't be able to treat it as an investment account in Quicken.

So, as I originally stated you can't change this

Sceptic

Chris, I agree with you. Circling back to the original question from the OP, what it boils down to is that the CashPlus account type is brokerage and no matter what you try to do that cannot be changed a checking account type, or a CMA.