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Managing and Downloading Schwab Cash Balances

Questions about updating prices or transactions in Fund Manager

Postby B2B_Investing » Thu Aug 20, 2020 8:07 am

Hello Mark, et al,

One of my financial institutions recently sold its investment accounts to Schwab. The transition has been bumpy at best.

How are folks managing recording the cash portion of investments held in taxable accounts at Schwab within Fund Manager? The institution seems to default to a cash account, not a money fund, as the sweep account and as such Fund Manager is not downloading external transfers made into this cash account.

At the previous and other financial institutions, by default cash is swept in a Prime or Government Money Fund which has a ticker and is pulled down by Fund Manager. Usually I just set the default cash account as this associated prime or government money fund and things just work. Is there something obvious I am missing either in the program or at Schwab? (i.e. I am not sure setting up a dummy cash account which would capture the external transfers in?)

This is made more awkward as Schwab does not allow automatic transfers into the money funds. Not having the cash portion of Schwab accounts readily available within Fund Manager, especially in swiftly moving markets, is challenging. For what it is worth, Schwab's sweep account option seems to be to their banking unit, which superficially seems to pose the same challenge with retrieving transfers and balance information.

Thoughts? For such a large broker this is needlesome.

Jason
Last edited by B2B_Investing on Mon Aug 24, 2020 5:33 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Postby Mark » Thu Aug 20, 2020 11:31 am

Hi Jason,

We don't have a specific formula for all of Schwab. Cash can be tricky, and it isn't always the same, even at a given broker. I would suggest following what transactions are actually downloaded, and then from that you can figure out how to configure cash. You can go back and retrieve for a date range where you can see the whole flow for a single buy/sell. If you buy a stock, what are all the downloaded transactions associated with that? The one's you see listed in the Preview Importing Transaction dialog are all from Schwab.

For example, look at a buy transaction, and if you see:

Buy ABC_Stock for $1,000 on Date X
Sell Money_Market for $1,000 on Date X + 3

You would want to set up a "sweep" cash account and use this as your default cash account in this case. The money market is not the default cash here. You would have both a sweep cash account and money market. On the other hand, if you see:

Buy ABC_Stock for $1,000 on Date X
Sell Money_Market for $1,000 on Date X

Then, you would not want to use a default cash account at all. Another possibility is:

Buy ABC_Stock for $1,000 on Date X

In this case, you would use a regular default cash account.

It really depends on how transactions are coming down from your broker. We have a tutorial on setting up cash that will hopefully help.

You also mentioned external transfers are not showing up. For this, you may need to use a default cash account and turn on investment banking transactions. See the "Advanced..." button in the "Transaction Retrieve Settings" dialog for this account. You can either test this, or take a look in the log file (Help / Logs / Transaction Retrieve (Parsed)...) and see how/where this external transfer is showing up. Maybe it is investment banking, maybe it is going into a cash account, and you just need to look at the CUSIP, and make sure you have it set right.
Thanks,
Mark
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Postby B2B_Investing » Mon Aug 24, 2020 5:59 am

Hi Mark,

Thanks. That helped a lot. I created a new investment (no CUISP) within the portfolio and added it as the default cash account. The investment banking transactions option was already checked within the Retrieve Transactions section. When I retrieved transactions, it did pull down all of the external transfers into the cash account. The debits for purchases were not there but I recall that FM will automatically add those as security purchases within that portfolio are made. I am not sure how the dividend reinvestment will be handled but expect they will process normally. Many thanks again for the great support for an excellent product.

Jason
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