How to use Money Market as a cash account

Mark256 · October 2020

I have several investment accounts where the “cash” account is a money market account. When I buy a stock Quicken sees it as a sale of the money market account and wants to record proceeds “to this account’s cash balance.” Of course, this should be a deduction from the money market account since I purchased a stock.

This results in false balances in the money market and the non-existing “cash” account. This must be a common problem, so how do you all handle this? I know that I can create an affiliated cash account and use the money market account for that, but I already have a lot of investment accounts and this will make it confusing.

I use Quicken 2020 Home, Business, and Rental Property

Jim_Harman · October 2020

You basically have two choices. Which is best for you depends on your personal preference and how your brokerage handles the downloaded transactions.

Option 1 is what you describe above - keep the cash in a MMF and when for example you buy stock, you sell the MMF with the proceeds going to the account's "Cash Balance" then the money for the purchase comes from the cash balance, reducing it to zero. Vanguard for example downloads all these transactions.

Option 2 is to ignore the MMF and keep all the cash in the cash balance. Some brokerages do this in their downloads, i.e. there are no Buys and Sells of the MMF. With other brokerages, you may need to delete the downloaded MMF Buys and Sells.

NotACPA · October 2020

For our taxable brokerage accounts, at Fidelity, I use the "Show cash in a checking account" option of the BROKERAGE accounts. These are our primary checking accounts.

For our IRA accounts, I use option 2 (above).

Jim_Harman · October 2020

You basically have two choices. Which is best for you depends on your personal preference and how your brokerage handles the downloaded transactions.

Option 1 is what you describe above - keep the cash in a MMF and when for example you buy stock, you sell the MMF with the proceeds going to the account's "Cash Balance" then the money for the purchase comes from the cash balance, reducing it to zero. Vanguard for example downloads all these transactions.

Option 2 is to ignore the MMF and keep all the cash in the cash balance. Some brokerages do this in their downloads, i.e. there are no Buys and Sells of the MMF. With other brokerages, you may need to delete the downloaded MMF Buys and Sells.

NotACPA · October 2020

For our taxable brokerage accounts, at Fidelity, I use the "Show cash in a checking account" option of the BROKERAGE accounts. These are our primary checking accounts.

For our IRA accounts, I use option 2 (above).

Mark256 · October 2020

Jim and Not CPA thanks, I would not have figured that out. You are geniuses.

Rich_M · October 2020

@Jim_Harman My Fidelity accounts technically keep cash in a core MMF, however they never properly transmit the necessary buy/sell transactions to Quicken to keep the core fund in balance in my register.

As a result, to simplify things, I have always shown my core fund as cash, this works fine for me.

Rick56 · November 2020

Sure would be easier if Quicken allowed the stock purchase to come directly from the money market accounts instead of entering an additional transaction manipulating between money market and cash accounts for each purchase.

How to use Money Market as a cash account

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