MD requiring Security field -- part 2
Earlier this year, @jdien07 asked about MD requiring a security or every transaction in investment accounts, including cash transactions such as bank fees. (See https://infinitekind.tenderapp.com/discussions/investments/8295-mon...). I have a related question and -- I hope -- an alternate solution.
First, if I'm understanding this correctly, having a security name in a cash-only transaction, such as a MiscExp transaction for an account fee, doesn't actually do anything. It's just a matter of confusion: it looks like there are transactions for a particular security, but the transactions do not, in fact, involve the security. (Presumably this would cause odd results in a search, but I haven't tried that.) So the entire issue is an annoyance but not a fatal flaw.
@dwg suggested using Bank Register transactions, which do not require securities. But suppose that transactions are downloaded. Is there a way to "move" transactions in the regular register to the Bank Register? (The idea of manually recreating a bunch of already-downloaded transactions in the Bank Register is a non-starter for me.)
The alternate solution that I think works is to create a dummy security with a name like "_cash" and use that security name in all investment accounts in which cash transactions might occur. I tried this in an investment account and now in cash transactions I can type in "_cash" (without the quotes) for the security name. For some reason, MD does not display this name in the drop-down list of securities but it does accept it; it then does not display the name in the register -- which is fine because the whole point is to not show a security name in a transaction that does not relate to that security.
There's at least one issue with this approach: when defining the dummy security, MD will not accept a price of zero: MD changes 0.0000 to 0.00001. However, this security does not show up in Portfolio view and, because the price is so low, MD rounds it out in value calculations.
OK, looks like it works. But I'm sure that some MD users have recoiled in horror when reading this post -- yes, for those of us (including me) who appreciate accounting, this solution is ugly. However, it appears to work, and it's no uglier than seeing random security names attached to cash transactions in the register.
So now my most important question is this: have I overlooked some disastrous implication? Is this solution going to mess up something else down the road? In other words, can anyone tell me why this won't work?
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1 Posted by Stuart Beesley ... on 07 Sep, 2024 04:55 PM
Just create a transaction with the type called Xfr. This does not require a security and is for bank/cash transactions...
2 Posted by dwg on 07 Sep, 2024 10:41 PM
There is only one transaction register.
There are two views of this data, the Investment Register view and the Bank Register view. The Investment Register view shows all data. The Bank Register view only shows a subset of data - that data that makes sense in a bank register.
All data in the Bank register view can be represented with an Xfr type of Investment transaction. This is the only transaction type that does not require a security. All other actions associates the transaction with a security, so a MiscInc is for income for a specific security.
Hence any general type of transactions that you want to enter into a investment register and not associate with a specific investment, as Stuart has said, can be entered using the Xfr action type. Xfr can be used for transfers between the Investment account and other accounts or between the investment account and any category.
3 Posted by bheck11 on 08 Sep, 2024 12:17 AM
@dwg, right, I knew that the Bank Register isn't really a separate one - but as you noted on that earlier query from jdien07, it's the view that appears to allow expense transactions without a security. However, I now see that those transactions are xfers when viewed in the full register.
Anyway, thank you Stuart and dwg for pointing out that I can use xfers to categories (in this case, expenses) as well as between accounts. (I should have figured that one out earlier....)
bheck11 closed this discussion on 08 Sep, 2024 12:17 AM.