QP2007: What Account Type for CD?

Posted by Margaret Wilson on November 4, 2006, 7:50 pm

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Hello,

I just opened a 6mo CD with Emigrant Direct. Although I'm familiar with
mutual fund (multiple & single), 403b and Roth IRA accounts, I have
never owned a CD. Since there's no account type for a CD (unless I
somehow missed it), I thought of creating it either as a savings account
or a single mutual fund account. I ended up creating the CD account as
a savings account, figuring it will simply earn interest each month like
my ED savings account. With a mutual fund account, I'd have to create a
security, which I'd prefer not to do unless there's good reason.

I'd appreciate any input on whether I've used the correct account type,
and if there's a better way.

Thx and Regards,

Margaret

Posted by John Pollard on November 4, 2006, 8:33 pm

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"Margaret Wilson" wrote

> I just opened a 6mo CD with Emigrant Direct. Although I'm

> familiar with mutual fund (multiple & single), 403b and Roth

> IRA accounts, I have never owned a CD. Since there's no

> account type for a CD (unless I somehow missed it), I thought

> of creating it either as a savings account or a single mutual

> fund account. I ended up creating the CD account as a savings

> account, figuring it will simply earn interest each month like

> my ED savings account. With a mutual fund account, I'd have

> to create a security, which I'd prefer not to do unless

> there's good reason.

> I'd appreciate any input on whether I've used the correct

> account type, and if there's a better way.

Unless Q2007 has some new method of treating CD's, I see nothing
wrong with your choice. Based on my experience with earlier
versions of Quicken, I know of only the two possibilities you
suggest (though the investment account does not need to be a
Single Mutual Fund account - and I'm not clear on the advantage
of using a SMF account).

In the past the choices might have been determined by (at least)
two factors: could you download interest transactions for the
CD's; and did you want the CD's to play a role in your Asset
Allocation.

Earlier versions of Quicken required that, if you wanted your
CD's to be included in your Asset Allocation stragegy, they had
to be held in investment accounts; newer versions of Quicken
allow you to designate a "cash flow" account to be treated as an
investment account, allowing it to be included in your asset
allocation plans ... so that consideration should no longer be
important.

The other consideration - being whether you could, and wanted
to, download the interest transactions - still exists. If your
fi makes the interest transactions available for download, I
believe you must choose an intrinsic Quicken account that is
compatible with the real-world account type where you own the
CD's (you can't download savings account transactions to an
investment account, or vice-versa). I had a few CD's with one
of my banks; I had to set them up as cash flow accounts (one per
CD) if I wanted to download transactions for them.

In an oversimplified summary: I think your choice is just right,
no matter what: you get the best of both worlds (assuming no
changes in treatment by Q2007).

[I know that many have complained about Quicken's lack of
ability to "understand" CD's; while I share the concern, I think
that the ability to download CD interest transactions, and the
new ability to include CD's in asset allocation no matter what
account type they are held in, solves most of the worst of the
problems.]

--
John Pollard
First initial underscore Last name at mchsi dot com
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Posted by Margaret Wilson on November 5, 2006, 11:49 am

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Hi John,

Thanks for your input. Emigrant Direct has web connect, but EWD isn't
working right now, as most of us are aware. ED also lets us manually
download transactions. Since my ED savings account gets little
activity, I don't bother to do the download, just manually reconcile and
download/save each month's PDF statement. I just put a few $$ from my
savings account into the ED CD (6mo), as it earns a tiny bit more
interest than the savings acct, and it was pretty much an experiment to
see how I like messing with CDs! ;-) I asked my orig question, because
I suspect I will open more, larger and longer CDs as time goes on, and I
thought I should get the Q acounts right while I have only one.

Thx and Regards,

Margaret

John Pollard wrote:

> Unless Q2007 has some new method of treating CD's, I see nothing

> wrong with your choice. Based on my experience with earlier

> versions of Quicken, I know of only the two possibilities you

> suggest (though the investment account does not need to be a

> Single Mutual Fund account - and I'm not clear on the advantage

> of using a SMF account).

<snip>

> The other consideration - being whether you could, and wanted

> to, download the interest transactions - still exists. If your

> fi makes the interest transactions available for download, I

> believe you must choose an intrinsic Quicken account that is

> compatible with the real-world account type where you own the

> CD's (you can't download savings account transactions to an

> investment account, or vice-versa). I had a few CD's with one

> of my banks; I had to set them up as cash flow accounts (one per

> CD) if I wanted to download transactions for them.

> In an oversimplified summary: I think your choice is just right,

> no matter what: you get the best of both worlds (assuming no

> changes in treatment by Q2007).

Posted by JB on November 5, 2006, 12:18 am

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> Hello,

> I just opened a 6mo CD with Emigrant Direct. Although I'm familiar with

> mutual fund (multiple & single), 403b and Roth IRA accounts, I have never

> owned a CD. Since there's no account type for a CD (unless I somehow

> missed it), I thought of creating it either as a savings account or a

> single mutual fund account. I ended up creating the CD account as a

> savings account, figuring it will simply earn interest each month like my

> ED savings account. With a mutual fund account, I'd have to create a

> security, which I'd prefer not to do unless there's good reason.

> I'd appreciate any input on whether I've used the correct account type,

> and if there's a better way.

> Thx and Regards,

> Margaret

I've had many CDs and that's my choice for setting them up. All am
interested in is the balance and I update it manually as statements come in.
If you were to put it in an investment account I think you'd want to treat
it as a bond and Quicken is very clumsy with bonds in spite of all the years
they've had to refine the process.

If I may, I have a couple unrelated questions for you. I recall from an old
thread here that you use Paperport 9 and I am wondering if it now works
properly with Windows XP Pro SP2. Google posts say XP SP2 broke it and I
can't tell from the Nuance update propaganda if it's been fixed.

Also I would appreciate it if you let me know if the mouse scroll function
works once you are inside a document. My version is 6.5 and lacks both the
scroll and pdf capabilities so I'd like to upgrade for those reasons.

Thank you,

Mike

Posted by Margaret Wilson on November 5, 2006, 12:10 pm

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Hi JB, thx for your input. You, John P and I all picked the savings
account type, so I'm assuming I got it right. ;-)

Re PaperPort. I did indeed have v9.0, and because I'm using it more and
more (and had some usability issues that were corrected in subsequent
versions), I upgraded to v10 and recently to v11. IIRC, it was either
v9 or 10 that allowed you to choose the native *.max filetype *or* PDF.
I really like using PDFs, esp if I ever decide to do away with
PaperPort (or it goes away for some reason), my files will be usable
outside PP. A do have a few *.max files hanging around, but I have yet
to investigate converting them to PDF. Anyway....

IIRC, the earliest version of PP I owned was v8.0. (Could be wrong,
perhaps 9.0) Although v10 was better than v9.0, v11.0 (current) fixes
*a lot* of usability issues. For example, reordering pages w/in a doc
is so much easier, and now you can actually see the contents of the
pages well enough to get it right w/out all the trial and error of
previous versions. (IIRC, this was better in both v9 and v10, but
perhaps only v10.) You can also change the default image quality for
PDFs, and naming and renaming files is much simpler. Same goes for
stacking and unstacking. Further, until recently, it was the only prog
I knew of that let me scan multipage PDFs. I've use Vuescan (shareware)
for years, but fairly recently an upgrade allowed scanning to PDF, and
it does multipage, too. I used to have to scan pages individually then
stack and reorder. Now I just use PP to scan PDFs (file size is smaller
than with Vuescan), and if I do need to stack, files stack in the
correct order as selected. Finally, it autostraightens scans, and is
just much better in many ways, though it took me using v11 a while
before I really started to notice the improvements over v10. I hope
this is all making sense. :-)

I'm sorry I can't answer your question about specific versions, but I've
been running XP SP2 since it came out, and I don't recall having any
problems w/ PP. Of course, I don't remember what version I was running
at the time. I'm guessing I ran both v9 & v10 before my recent upgrade
to v11. BTW, there's a "pro" version of v11, which I didn't buy. I
believe it comes with some PDF converter functions that I didn't expect
to use. So I upgraded to just the basic v11. I have been *very* happy
with the new version and recommend that if you can, just go right to
v11. It's so much more configurable, resolves a number of issues, some
detailed above.

Also, you may be aware of this already, but Nuance bought out ScanSoft,
or they chgd the co name, not sure. I just went to the web site and see
that you can download the "Pro" trial version. (Don't see one for the
basic v11.) But here's the main link that explains features and lets
you purchase upgrade:

http://www.nuance.com/paperport/

Hope this helps, and feel free to contact me directly if you have more
?? (FYI, my email addr is munged when you do a reply.)

Regards,

Margaret

JB wrote:

> I've had many CDs and that's my choice for setting them up. All am

> interested in is the balance and I update it manually as statements come in.

> If you were to put it in an investment account I think you'd want to treat

> it as a bond and Quicken is very clumsy with bonds in spite of all the years

> they've had to refine the process.

> If I may, I have a couple unrelated questions for you. I recall from an old

> thread here that you use Paperport 9 and I am wondering if it now works

> properly with Windows XP Pro SP2. Google posts say XP SP2 broke it and I

> can't tell from the Nuance update propaganda if it's been fixed.

> Also I would appreciate it if you let me know if the mouse scroll function

> works once you are inside a document. My version is 6.5 and lacks both the

> scroll and pdf capabilities so I'd like to upgrade for those reasons.