ESPP Setup Question

Unknown

Newbie Alert!  I am new to Quicken and am looking for guidance on how to add an ESPP account.  Using Quicken 2016 Home & Business (Canada), Windows 10.

This is a two part question (maybe more);

Question 1
My company matches my stock purchases, share for share, there is no discount on the shares I purchase.  The company shares are vested for one year.  Are the vested shares able to be tracked?  Do I need to setup different accounts for both? 

As an aside, when I do setup a brokerage account for the ESPP, it asks me for the amount of shares.  When I go to look at the transactions page, the Share Bal and Inv Amt are not updated.  Do I have to manually update this?  Is this because Quicken doesn't find my ticker symbol?

Question 2
Being that Quicken wants to track everything from one account to another, I began setting up my pay cheque with all the applicable line items.  My pay stub shows the company share match as a dollar value on the earnings benefit side, it does not add to the gross pay but does add to the taxable gross.  How do I add this line item to my pay cheque such that it doesn't add to my gross pay but is tracked for the taxable benefit?  The only other way I see to do this is to add it as an earning, then a make a deduction, which will throw the gross pay and deductions number out of sync from the pay stub.

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks,

Jeff

K.O. (Win-Premier)

I'll take a shot at pointing you in the right direction.  I used to have an ESPP and muddled through all the nuances of ESPP and paycheck but my ESPP ended 5 years ago so apologies in advance if I don't have the complete solution from memory.

Account Setup - for me I manually entered these.  Not sure if any brokerage downloads ESPP shares or not.

Matching/Vesting - I only had to deal with ESPP and non-ESPP so I set up separate securities with the same ticker symbol.  ABC - Company ESPP and ABC - Company so that I could track them separately.  Does the vesting occur at the end of the ESPP period or do they vest sometime in the future?  

If they vest at the end of the ESPP period then really it's just unearned money and not unvested shares and the money can just sit in the investment account until purchases are made.  If your company actually purchases the shares before they are vested then I would think about setting up a 3rd stock (same ticker) for the unvested ESPP and enter a reminder in the register as to when they vest and how many.  When they vest go back and change the original transaction from the unvested ticker to the vested ticker.  While technically not correct it will keep the accurate cost basis as such.  While you could use separate accounts for unvested vs vested and then transfer the shares when vested I would find that more complicated personally (but see discussion below as it may relate).

Paycheck setup.  FYI ... I'm not a tax accountant.  While I think gross pay and taxable gross will both be part of taxable income on your W-2 but I don't know if they are in the same year if the shares are unvested.  In other words, at the end of this year is the amount related to unvested shares considered taxable or not.  If it is taxable in the current year (even if unvested) you can just set up the amount for the match as an additional earning and a post tax transfer line because you'll be taxed on it.  If it is only taxable when vested it will be trickier.  In this case I think I would set it up as earnings but then use a separate account (different from advice above) to transfer the money out of the paycheck using pre-tax deduction.  And then you'll have to figure out a way when the money is considered taxable to register a taxable entry when its taxed.  I can't seem to think of a clean way to do this.  You may need to play with it unless another user has better advice.

Best of luck.  

Unknown

Thank you Kevin for your time, you have confirmed what I have ultimately started doing. 

I am going with two accounts, vested and unvested, and will use your reminder trick to keep it updated.

As for the paycheque setup; I will be adding the company match to earnings as this is a taxable benefit that adds to my income for the current tax year.  I will then need to make a deduction to transfer it to the unvested account.

Thanks again,
Jeff