QWIN and QMAC Portfolio Issue

Bob. · November 14

This is identical in both QWindows ands QMac but Qwin alerted me to this inconsistency today and no alert from Mac. I could use some help correcting this.

I bought a stock. It used more than the available balance in my Core acct, SPAXX and then correctly took the balance from another MM fund I hold. All good, so far.

Quicken now shows the SPAXX balance as negative the amount taken from the MM fund and the MM fund inflated by the negative amount in SPAXX!

So, for example, let's say I had:

MM 100,000
Spaxx 20,000

I buy 40,000 of a new stock

Quicken shows:

MM 100,000
SPAXX -20,000

What it should show is:

MM 80,000
SPAXX 0.00

How do I correct this? And it likely should be reported as a bug.

Tagging @Quicken Kristina and @Boatnmaniac

Thanks.

Jim_Harman · November 14

You should be able to correct this situation by manually entering a sale of the MM fund for 20,000 shares at 1.00 and a Bought of SPAXX for the same amount.

Bob. · November 14

Too simple, Jim :) Will that keep Quicken in sync with the brokerage then? I guess I have to try. And odd Quicken did not do that automatically, no?

Tom Young · November 14

I can only guess that you're not entering transactions manually but instead relying on downloads to do your accounting for you?

If that's correct then delete the downloaded transactions and make the correct entries to reflect what really happened.

Yes, the downloads resulted in incorrect balances and that is a form of "a bug" but the blame might be on the Financial Institution or Quicken.

Jim_Harman · November 14

Entering the missing transactions should correct any Security Comparison Mismatches you are seeing.

One potential wrinkle is if you have set Quicken to show the SPAXX holding as Cash rather than shares of SPAXX but Fidelity is downloading SPAXX as shares. If you don't enter the Buy of SPAXX, you will see the cash as you like it and your account balance will be correct but you will continue to get mismatches for SPAXX.

Bob. · November 14

Yes, Tom. Downloading. Rare to ever do anything manually to investments.

OK, I tried Jim's suggestion. First, now 2 orange pencils waiting to match. Second, MM account is correct, but "cash" still showing negative even though the total brokerage account is correct.

Afraid I might have made things worse.

Tom, the original transactions were only BUYS for the stock I bought. No sell of either Core or MM. So nothing to delete.

Bob. · November 14

BTW, I am trying these suggestion only in MAC. Easier to access.

Bob. · November 14

@Jim_Harman

This confuses me:

One potential wrinkle is if you have set Quicken to show the SPAXX holding as Cash rather than shares of SPAXX but Fidelity is downloading SPAXX as shares. If you don't enter the Buy of SPAXX, you will see the cash as you like it and your account balance will be correct but you will continue to get mismatches for SPAXX.

I have SPAXX set as core. I have never seen SPAXX treated as shares. Yet, as above, it still shows negative even though total portfolio balance is accurate.

Got a fix?

UPDATE:

The BUY of SPAXX transaction is the error.

If that were positive I think it would be correct?

And thanks for the help guys.

Bob. · November 14

I'm thinking to delete the buy for SPAXX, but then as Jim warns, will there be an issue going forward? I see no reason to keep a SPAXX balance as I can buy off of the Premium MM account. Am I wrong?

Bob. · November 14

That seemed to work. AND, the only time SPAXX should change is either moving $$ fro MM to Core, or Interest, or funding from an outside source, no? So should not be an issue, yes?

Learning :)

Bob. · November 14

Gonna consider this fixed. Just surprised that Quicken would ever allow a negative balance in a cash fund, especially when not accurate.

Thanks for the help…

Tom Young · November 14

Well, if SPAXX is being treated as "cash" in Quicken then that negative position makes sense; you can go negative with "cash" in a broker account.

Explain, mechanically, how the MM fund absorbed the balance owed. If you say that the FI made the reduction instantaneously then you probably opt to have that security treated as cash too.

Bob. · November 14

Fidelity just "does" that. If there is another money market fund other than core, they use that is core is exhausted. But it appears Fidelity site shows balances properly while Quicken never took the funds from MM to replenish core to 0.

Tom Young · November 14

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20522175#Comment_20522175

You have to understand that Quicken really doesn't have any "do" anything without an input.

So if you manually enter a Buy all you're entering is the purchase of the security and Quicken simply makes the balancing entry as a reduction of cash.

(I have no money market funds in Quicken denoted as "cash" - they're all "securities" - so my SPECULATION was that since you do have SPAXX treated as cash and (apparently no real cash in the Account), Quicken used the SPAXX in its place, driving the SPAXX into a negative position.)

I can only assume that if the MM fund was considered as "cash" in Quicken it MIGHT drive SPAXX to 0 then start in on the MM fund but I really don't know.

Bob. · November 14

Tom, if the Fidelity site shows SPAXX 0 and MM debited, then I "assume" Quicken should have as well. And if not, why not?

I had money in SPAXX. Forever. But I recently bought more than there so they debited MM. Problem is they left SPAXX as a negative and overstated MM.

But all seems to be Ok. now.

Tom Young · November 14

"Tom, if the Fidelity site shows SPAXX 0 and MM debited, then I "assume" Quicken should have as well."

I'm sure you've heard that joke as to what "assume" stands for, as an acronym.

The only thing Quicken "knows" is what it gets from the broker.

"Back in the day" - I'm dating myself - when downloads were handled through Direct Connect, then the broker was the one creating the information to be sent to Quicken and Quicken had to accept it "as is" so any mistakes could be fairly reliably blamed on the broker for their construction of the file that was sent to Quicken.

Now, with (Express Web Connect / Express Web Connect+) it's not so clear who exactly is determining what gets sent to Quicken. At least, I don't know.

Since I don't use Fidelity and don't understand what products or programs they might offer - I guessed at Fidelity as the broker because of the SPAXX but don't have a clue as to what particular Money Market fund you're referring to with "MM" - I can't tell you where the problem lies.

SPECULATING that you have two sweep funds in your account with Fidelity, (why anybody would have two sweep funds is beyond me, but I guess it could happen), and you've got both SPAXX and that MM in your portfolio being treated as "cash" I could speculate that Quicken would see both of them as "cash" and eat through one and then eat through the other to get enough "cash" to make a balanced entry, but I don't know that it does that. The entry you posted of the $17K Buy looks to have used (real) cash as the offset and Fidelity "swept" that $17K out of SPAXX resulting in a reduction of SPAXX by the same amount.

You need to have a pretty good understanding of the "real world" transactions at the brokerage and then a good enough understanding of how Quicken works to "map" those real world transactions to Quicken.

For all the very plain investment vanilla transactions that go on - buys, sells, dividends and the like - Quicken does a good job, generally. But you simply cannot rely on "downloads" to keep everything exactly correct. From time to time you do have to go in and delete/change/add to what's been downloaded to get the correct accounting.

Bob. · November 14

Tom, let it go. I do not have two sweep funds. it seems you do not understand that Fidelity will AUTOMATICALLY debit any other MM fund if the CORE is exhausted. This is what I wanted. This is what they did. This is what Quicken did not register properly for WHATEVER reason.

With all the Fidelity EWC+ foo I thought this might be yet another case of miscategorizing a transaction. It may be. It may not be.

The solution was to simply sell shares of the MM (FZCXX since you are so curious) and then Quicken matches the Fidelity site. The better solution would be for Quicken to download the proper information so an adjustment would not be needed.

I do not need to know who's fault this is.

I appreciate the help.

I thought someone Quicken might want to know this COULD BE yet another issues with Fidelity EWC+ and I anted my account to mirror online without creating a new or ongoing issue.

Its all done.

The horse have been severely beaten.

qudtp · November 14

This is a known problem, many other discussions of it where users give the same detailed information, and Quicken is tracking this.

I am pretty sure the cause will turn out to be that Fidelity is not including the sale of the secondary mutual fund in the data it provides to Quicken.

I correct these mistakes as follows.

If representing the core fund as cash: On Mac, manually insert a pair of adjustment transactions: "Remove Shares" to decrease the secondary money market, and "Payment/Deposit" to increase the cash. On Windows, I use the two menu options "Update Share Balance…" and "Update Cash Balance…" to fix the fund and the cash.

If representing the core fund as a fund, on Mac I would use "Remove Shares" and "Add Shares" for the 2 funds. On Windows, "Update Share Balance…" for both.

While I treat core as cash, Windows fails to do so with FDRXX, so I often get the warning from Quicken that the number of shares in Quicken doesn't match the number of shares at Fidelity. The Quicken user interface here is VERY unclear: If you just click okay, it will insert a placeholder for the missing shares, not what you want. But, if you click the Details button, you are shown a screen with the options to create a placeholder, or ignore. I click ignore - it leaves my Quicken cash balance correct, matching my balance in the core fund, and does not create a placeholder for the core fund. That's a lot faster than manually correcting it after the fact by adjusting shares and adding cash.

Bob. · November 14

Thanks @qudtp I am familiar with issues such as data coming in with DIV and BUY instead of REINVD but have not seen this one where CORE went negative and MM overstated..

NOTE, For me it only took 1 correction. Just the SELL of MM shares which 0'd out the negative cash and corrected MM balance. That is all. One simple sell. It does/did not require a "pair" of transactions. In BOTH Mac and Win.

qudtp · November 14

Yes that is a simpler solution. Thanks!

QWIN and QMAC Portfolio Issue

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