Cash account linked to an investment account--How Does MoneyDance Deal with multiple Accounts from the same source?
I just attempted to move about 20 years of data from Microsoft Money to Moneydance. This includes 4 Schwab brokerage accounts and 1 Schwab bank(checking) account, closely following the instructions given. What I ended up with is, frankly, a hopeless mess!!!
Support Staff 2 Posted by Angie Rauscher on 02 Sep, 2010 03:51 AM
JB,
I split this piece of the discussion off from the original thread it had been posted on so we could work more directly on the import issue. The move from MS Money to Moneydance can be complicated, in large part because of the limitations of the QIF file format and export process. Are there pieces of this process which I could be of assistance with, or specific questions I can answer about the transition process?
Please let me know how I can be of further assistance,
Angie Rauscher
Moneydance Support
3 Posted by JB on 14 Oct, 2010 08:44 PM
Angie:
I've now been living with Moneydance for over 5 weeks, and I'm liking its simplicity compared to MS Money. The "mess" I had after importing my accounts from Money turned out to be not as bad as I thought. Most of the problems seemed to be related to transfers between accounts. With some effort, I got those cleaned up to my satisfaction.
Also, I had several employee stock option plans in the past with vesting schedules. Money could handle these, but I don't believe Moneydance can. At any rate, I no longer have these plans, so for me it doesn't matter.
I just took some time to check out my Schwab brokerage accounts. Schwab routinely "sweeps" cash in and out of a money market account. For example, if I receive a dividend, it then uses the cash to buy money market shares. The opposite happens when I get hit with a management fee. It sells money market shares to cover it. I noticed that these "buys" and "sells" are not picked up by Moneydance after downloading the transactions. Is this by design? Why does this happen?
4 Posted by -Kevin N. on 14 Oct, 2010 09:21 PM
Hi jabiermann,
I can't speak to why the Money Market txns don't download. All I can add is that the same thing happens with Fidelity. So it just may be by design.
I have to manually account for the 'sweeps'
HTH -Kevin N.
5 Posted by JB on 14 Oct, 2010 10:00 PM
If it does this by design, that's OK since this is just cash.
I would like to know, though, how it differentiates the sweep from other transactions.
6 Posted by -Kevin N. on 15 Oct, 2010 02:47 AM
Hi JB,
I've treated the Money Market 'sweep' fund as I would any other security in Moneydance. Added the Security, entered the Ticker and it still doesn't download.
So I'm thinking that it might be by Fidelity's, or in your case Schwab's design and not so much Moneydance's.
HTH -Kevin N.
7 Posted by Oilcan on 15 Oct, 2010 02:53 PM
Schwab doesn't show sweep transactions - you just have to know they are happening. You can simply treat it as a running cash balance in your account without setting up the actual sweep investment account.
8 Posted by JB on 15 Oct, 2010 04:06 PM
Oilcan:
My Schwab brokerage accounts definitely show the sweeps. They appear as buys and sells of a Schwab money market account (symbol SWZXX). I just spoke to Schwab tech support, and they confirmed that these are the cash sweeps, and that there is nothing special about how they are coded in their system, i.e. they are just normal buy and sell transactions.
This leads me back to my original question: why doesn't Moneydance pick these up during a typical download?
9 Posted by Oilcan on 15 Oct, 2010 05:05 PM
I confirm against my two Schwab Accounts that I do not download sweep transactions even if they appear on the paper statement. This is both in MoneyDance and my Quicken 2010 datasets. Therefore they do not place the transactions in the OFX transaction file. The exception is the interest (the pennys I receive) is downloaded as an income. You can simply leave it as a running cash balance or manually enter the transaction. Either way will work, its your preference.
When I had my brokerage at Banc of America (now Merril Lynch), I did receive the sweep transactions. So Investment Firms handle this in different ways.
Oilcan
10 Posted by JB on 15 Oct, 2010 07:31 PM
I guess you're right that Schwab just doesn't place these buys and sells in the transaction file. As I said in my earlier post, I don't care since it is just cash, and the money market fund they buy and sell is fixed at $1/share.
I'm still curious why they bother to omit these.
Thanks for your help.
JB