Confused about investment account register / bank register
Wasn't sure where to post this; decided on this this area to make it clear I'm a Moneydance newbie :) I'm migrating from an application that, for an investment account, has a Transactions list and a Holdings list. Holdings is analogous to Moneydance's Portfolio View. Moneydance shows transactions in two lists.
Please check me on this: I think the Bank Register shows a subset of transactions in Register, i.e., those that reflect deposits and withdrawals of cash that are not directly related to specific securities. An article search turned up one on Investment Account Registers that says,
Moneydance offers integrated support for linked investment and checking accounts.
The bank register view makes it easy to enter standard bank-type transactions, and include these transactions in the balance of your investment account.
"Offers" seems to imply an option; but I'm inferring that if you want a securities account, you get support for associated checking regardless of whether the institution offers it and regardless of whether it's via a linked account or via features of a single investment account, such as check-writing and/or a debit card. But that's an aside... Here's my main question:
The Register has a single Amount column rather than Increase and Decrease columns. I'm having trouble figuring out the rules for how transactions affect the balance. The sign ("-" or "+" implied by no sign) doesn't always predict the affect. E.g., buy and sell amounts are both unsigned (both positive?) but affect the balance as one would expect, decreasing and increasing respectively. Depositing a check or receiving a dividend or EFT: positive, increase. EFT to another institution: negative, decrease. But a direct deposit of cash rewards from a credit card offered by the brokerage: negative, decrease(!?); in the Bank Register this amount is unsigned in the Decrease column. This is what has me scratching my head. Note that most of the transactions, including the cash rewards deposits, got into the source (.qif creator) account via direct download. This particular transaction is in the source application's Increase column, and got into Moneydance via this .qif file transaction:
D02/02/2023
NXOut
PDIRECT DEPOSIT [word here indicates credit card cash reward]
T12.34
L
$12.34
O0.00
I'm providing all this detail about this transaction because I'm wondering if its being handled as a cash decrease is due to a bug/glitch in the switching/migrating process. Specifically, I'm suspicious of the XOut transaction type.
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1 Posted by dtd on 26 Mar, 2023 11:41 PM
just a user - first of all, I tend to ignore the Bank Register entirely for many reasons I won't go into. That said, using it to diagnose as you are doing, is useful.
Moneydance does not support many of the action types that Quicken uses, some due to not allowing money to be created/disposed of as MD uses stricter double entry accounting.
I do see that my transfers when I moved from quicken do have XIn and XOut, and they appear to work properly. XOut is usually a decrease and XIn is usually an increase.
QIF is not intended to be a conversion mechanism, but it is all anyone has. In cases like this, when I converted, I'd just make it right, sigh, and look for the next glitch. Credit cards and Banks tend to work pretty well in a QIF conversion, Investment accounts are problematic with quite a few things that have to be massaged to make correct.
2 Posted by brec on 26 Mar, 2023 11:50 PM
Yeah, that's why I suspect it's wrong in this case. In the source (SEE Finance) transactions list, the transactions in question say "direct deposit" in the Payee and Memo columns, with nothing in the Category column. So XOut in the .qif seems wrong, and maybe that's what throws Moneydance off even though the amount in the .qif is positive.
3 Posted by dwg on 27 Mar, 2023 12:13 AM
I'm a fellow user.
The bank register in Investment accounts was introduced specifically for those investment accounts that provide banking type facilities.
As you surmise it is a subset of transactions from the investment account, specially it is those transaction that make sense in a bank type scenario and you can see some differences to how those transactions are displayed between the registers. The Investment register has actions, the other registers do not.
Prior to this you would have had to use a separate bank account. This is problematic with some institutions in that the OFX spec supports account types and if an account type is specified in the download and the account you are trying to import it into does not match then nothing gets imported.
Even if you do not have this issue the bank register can be useful for some.
For example Moneydance does not have an "Int" action type which troubles some (I have bought this to the attention of the developer) and while you can enter the transaction some do not like how it is done, so you switch to the bank register and can enter it like you would in a savings account.
If you need to transfer monies to/from an account in a different currency you cannot do it in the Investment register, but you can in the bank register,
The bank register also supports split transactions.
XIn and XOut have no real meaning in a bank register, they are just text strings the column used and the category are the real indicators of what is happening. The investment registers just has "Xfr" a positive amount is money in a negative amount is money out.
The action field in an Investment register indicated how a transactions is to be handled, there is no equivalent in other accounts and money in these is either just coming in or going out and the column uses indicates that.
4 Posted by brec on 27 Mar, 2023 01:43 AM
I have about 100 of these XOut transactions that have the wrong (negative) amount sign. The only way I can think of to change them is to export to a spreadsheet, change them there, and import them. Moneydance's batch change doesn't do Check# (XOut) or amount sign inversion.
5 Posted by dwg on 27 Mar, 2023 01:47 AM
It sounds like the QIF produced by SEE is more creative in some respects than we normally see from programs like Quicken.
System closed this discussion on 26 Jun, 2023 01:50 AM.