Accrued Interest Paid is missing from Downloaded Bond transactions Edward Jones

"Accrued interest is an expense component of a purchase bond transaction."

No it's not, at least not using the proper accounting definition of an expense.

Yes, it's money out of your pocket which to most people "feels" like an "expense", but what it really is a form of a "receivable." That money will come back to you with the next coupon payment where you'll get the entire amount of the payment, even the amount that the previous owner earned while he held the bond.

So the broker does remove the cash from your account, but all they download is the cash used to buy the bond?

I assume Edward Jones has the ability to send a confirmation of the purchase? The confirmation should be available to you one day after the trade itself and that confirmation should have the accrued interest on it. Use that confirmation to manually enter the trade using the Bonds Bought action. Quicken will make two entries, one the the bond purchase and one for the accrued interest. The substituent download should result in a Match of the bond purchase and you manually "clear" the accrued interest transaction after making sure the sum of the two transactions reduces cash by the correct amount.

Quicken does account for the accrued interest as a form of expense and you can leave it that way if you want to, though depending on timing your Income and Expense by Category report could be understated in one period and then overstated in a subsequent period.

There's no "play on words" going on here.

I know most people call most outflows of cash an "expense" but that's not really the case. The accrued interest is most properly viewed as an "asset", some sort of "receivable," because you will get that money back with the next interest payment. So if you buy a bond with accrued interest in 2025 but the first bond payment isn't until 2026, you won't the entire amount of the payment on your 2026 tax return, you'll reduce that payment by the amount of the accrued interest you paid.

Quicken's Bond Bought action doesn't actually do "proper" accounting for a bond purchased with accrued interest, though if the purchase and 1st payment of interest all happen in the same year than the net of the accrued interest plus the coupon payment all washes out to only the excess of coupon over accrued interest being declared as income.

You can say those exact same words about the bond purchase itself but I'll bet that you didn't expense the bond, did you? But really, do whatever you think is right for you.