Replace current investment acts with new investment acts that have full cash acct capabilities

@RTK I tend to agree with you, especially now that the Investment module is out of beta testing.

First though, a fast rundown on the history of investment transactions. Originally all Simplifi did was report your holdings and the current value so you could monitor it and count it in your net worth. When they introduced transactions, they made a decision that you could see the transactions and include the payment/deposits in Spending Plan and Reports BUT Simplifi would still ignore the transactions insofar as the value of the account was concerned. In other words, the daily download of holdings and value was still all that counted.

Initially, there were some bugs in the module, of course, and some of the dividend transactions ended up in the Spending Plan/Reports. Folks on here were very vociferous about NOT wanting that. I was a contrarian and I pointed out that brokerage accounts are taxable and therefore the dividends (rather paid out in cash or reinvested) should be in the Spending Plan. The compromise was that if you wanted the dividends in your spending plan, you had to change the dividend income part to a deposit, but the reinvestment part (or buy), if any, would still be ignored. (In my case, this wasn't too complicated as I only have 3-4 dividends that I don't reinvest but spend so they truly are deposits.)

In the two years, since Simplifi introduced investment transactions, there have been two developments that I think strengthen our case:

1. A feature was added so that a user may exclude any account from Spending Plan and/or Reports.
2. A Tax Report was added.

The first one means that any user who wants to exclude these transactions may do so simply by going to Account Settings. The tax report in order to be complete needs the taxable dividends to be included. (Yes, most users use the 1099-DIV instead, as do I but it does help me to have it in the report as I have to send estimated tax payments to the IRS.)

So those of us who want to count these dividend and/or interest deposits have to jump through some hoops. Besides editing my deposits (though most of the time Fidelity downloads it right), I also had to add some categories: taxable dividends, non-taxable dividends. Once you make it a deposit, Simplifi won't use the built-in Income Dividend or Reinvest Dividend that are only for those special investment transactions. And of course, I tie my categories to the correct category on Schedule B of my tax return. So my tax report is now complete.

The problem that I see it is that to change all this to make them all cash accounts would be complicated and might mean rewriting the module so that the transactions are paramount and supersede the downloaded holdings/account value. This would be complicated for the programmers and something most users don't care about. It may well happen down the road though. The easier thing would be just to let users put what they want in reports and spending plan (one of the suggestions Coach Natalie referenced below). This shouldn't be so complicated.

In the meantime, for people like you and me, we can just use the workaround, which, I admit, can be complicated especially when one has a lot of dividend transactions. All the buys and sells are basically transfers so to me it's fine not to worry about them.

Finally the more pressing demand right now is to let people with cash management accounts classify them as a checking or savings account so that all the cash options are there, ie splits, debit cards, checks, etc. And these accounts would then just ignore the investment stuff. That is basically what they do anyhow.

And the Quicken folks are on record that they are looking for ways to do that. When and how that will be implemented they haven't said yet.