Can I enter or edit the Valuation for an AddShares transaction in QPW17R4?

Unknown

In QPW15 I was able to enter/edit the Valuation for an AddShares transaction.  (Valuation is needed for a correct performance report.)  In QPW17R4 I can not find these fields. 

The only work around is to enter it in another Account, make sure the price is correct, and do a SharesTransfer to the proper account and delete the SharesRemoved from the 1st account.

Is there an easier way?

Jim_Harman

If you do Enter Transactions/Add Shares it's there in the dialog - enter the number of shares, leave the price paid blank, and enter your original acquisition cost and date.

However my experience is that any Add and Remove transactions wreak havoc with performance reporting. It is much better to enter Deposit cash and Buy transactions on the original acquisition date(s).

Jim_Harman

I think the problem with the performance reporting for Adds is that for example if you do an Add Shares dated this year for shares that were acquired in a previous year, the capital gain calculations will be OK but the Investment Performance report for this year is wrong. It treats the added holdings as if they were acquired on the date of the Add but at the original purchase price. 

mshiggins

Jim Harman said:

I think the problem with the performance reporting for Adds is that for example if you do an Add Shares dated this year for shares that were acquired in a previous year, the capital gain calculations will be OK but the Investment Performance report for this year is wrong. It treats the added holdings as if they were acquired on the date of the Add but at the original purchase price. 

Wow. That's a pretty significant bug.

Jim_Harman

Jim Harman said:

I think the problem with the performance reporting for Adds is that for example if you do an Add Shares dated this year for shares that were acquired in a previous year, the capital gain calculations will be OK but the Investment Performance report for this year is wrong. It treats the added holdings as if they were acquired on the date of the Add but at the original purchase price. 

Yeah. The Add lets you enter the purchase info but there is no place to enter the current value of the holding, so the value at the time of the Add is not captured. I think you might be able to work around this as the OP suggests by adding the shares to another account where you don't care about performance tracking then transferring them to the real account.

Unknown

Jim Harman said:

I think the problem with the performance reporting for Adds is that for example if you do an Add Shares dated this year for shares that were acquired in a previous year, the capital gain calculations will be OK but the Investment Performance report for this year is wrong. It treats the added holdings as if they were acquired on the date of the Add but at the original purchase price. 

Leaving the price blank just makes Quicken compute it.  It still treats the total cost as the share's basis.  The AddCash/BuyStock idea still gives an incorrect performance report for any report starting between the original date and the date the shares were added to the account. However I agree it is much closer to the truth than just using the basis.

Jim_Harman

Update: Adding the shares to another account then transferring seems to work correctly. Transferring produces a Remove in the source register and computes the current market value. This is shown in the leftmost box on the second line of the register. 

It also creates an Add in the destination register. The Add has the date of the transfer and shows the original purchase date and cost. However, the Investment Performance report now correctly shows the market value rather than the original cost in the Investments column, so the performance is correct.

It sure would be nice if there was a way to specify the current market value in the Add dialog and have that carry over to the report!

smutschler

BEWARE: "Add Shares" transaction and "Investment Amount" (Quicken 2017 and others)

The "Add Shares" transaction has been a problem (and in my opinion, bug-ridden) for decades.
For the benefit of other hapless souls like myself, here is what I currently believe to be true based on personal experimentation on the "Add Shares" transaction, with particular focus on the Investment Amount, the famously confusing number seen in Investment Performance reports:

1.  IMPORTANT NOTE:  The "Add Shares" transaction has both a date of entry AND a "Date Acquired" field.  The "Buy Shares" transaction does not -- it captures a single date only, that being the Date of Acquisition.  This distinction is important when we discuss (later below) problems with correctly recording "Investment Amount".

2. It is also important to recognize that the definition of "Investment Amount" is a bit obtuse.  (This is a column in Investment Performance reports.)  It should have been called "Investment Valuation" and I believe it was in some past versions.  Sometimes this number matches "Cost Basis", but that is merely a coincidence.  Investment valuation does, of course, equal Cost Basis on the date of acquisition.  But on other dates, not so much.  Valuation ("Investment Amount") is intended to reflect market value at points in time such that a delta (difference or change) in value can be calculated across various time intervals.  This is important to the concept of the Performance Report wherein Quicken attempts to show time-oriented performance and an Average Annual Return Percentage. In an Investment Performance report, Quicken appears to calculate a security's market value on the End-Date of the report by using the stock price from the price history table.  Valuations on other event dates (like the date of an Add Shares transaction) do NOT calculate value this way.  For whatever reason, Quicken designers chose instead to store and retrieve the value in certain instances.  Read on below to see when this can be a problem... 

3.  In past versions of Quicken, the "Add Shares" transaction allowed entry of the Investment Value (how much the Investment is worth on the Date Added as opposed to the Cost Basis on the Date Acquired).  This Value data is no longer accessible or editable within Quicken. HOWEVER, IT IS STILL STORED INTERNALLY, JUST NOT EDITABLE.

4.  THE PROBLEM:  When an "Add Shares" transaction is entered, the "Investment Amount" (valuation) is recorded based on the Total Cost field.  No problem there.  The weirdness is that "Investment Amount" is frozen forever at that moment -- IT IS NOT ALTERED by future edits to that Add Shares transaction!   You can edit the Total Cost (or share price) and re-post the transaction, but the Investment Performance reports will ALWAYS show the Investment Amount to be the original Total Cost you entered when the Add Shares transaction was first created.  If you want to alter the Investment Amount, you need to delete the original Add Shares transaction and create a new one using the desired valuation in the Total Cost field.  (Remember, the "Buy Shares" transaction does not have this issue -- it's related Investment Amount will always match Total Cost.)

5.  WHY IS THIS?  It is impressive what the Quicken designers are trying to accomplish in the Investment Performance report.  Sophisticated investors appreciate the report... if only it worked properly.  Banks and investment companies write some pretty sophisticated software to calculate such time-oriented investment and rate of return statistics.  Anyway, here are 2 basic examples of why Quicken does what it does, while holding firm on the opinion that the software DOES need to be fixed in the future to allow proper manipulation of the data:

A.  When you wish to measure performance of a stock or security between two dates you not only need to know the market price on the start and end dates, but also need to account for any additional acquisitions and sales of the stock that were executed during the observation period.   Unfortunately, Quicken handles this clumsily.  For one, it DOES NOT account for partial sales -- as long as any shares (or even a fraction thereof) remain in ownership, the report shows ZERO cost recovery (zero in the Returns column).  The report shows the full amount of sale proceeds (in the Returns column) only when the share count is reduced to zero -- i.e., you have sold or removed ALL of the held shares.  One saving grace is that the report does reflect new acquisitions/purchases of a security, calculating an Investment Amount that is supposedly "marked to market" on the date of the transaction.  It is a little tricky when shares are "added" to an account rather than "bought".  If a line on the report showing the acquisition of new shares is an "Add Shares" transaction, the report needs to show (as Investment Amount) the market VALUE of those shares on the day they were added -- NOT the actual Cost Basis.  The valuation is the "implied cost" of the investment on the day the shares were added to the Account.  Remember, the valuation equals the Cost Basis only on the Date Acquired, which in the case of "Add Shares" is usually a different date.   The amount used in the Investment Performance report is the Total Cost that was entered in the Add Share transaction when it was first created (as noted earlier, edits to the transaction do NOT change this value).  I believe Quicken also records an entry in the stock price history table using the date of the Add Shares transaction, if a stock price record does not already exist for that date.  However, the Performance Report will always show the internal hidden Investment Amount from "Add Shares" transactions, rather than (as we might expect) calculating the market value using the stock price as of the Add Shares transaction date. 

B. An even more fun and confusing transaction is exchange of a Mutual Fund.  It is called "Mutual Fund Conversion" in the drop-down action menu in Quicken 2017.  It is similar to "Corporate Acquisition (stock for stock)".  "Mutual Fund Conversion" is intended for non-taxable exchanges, such as when you receive Class A shares to replace your Class C shares within the same mutual fund.  The Mutual Fund Conversion transaction performs a behind-the-scenes trick to record a "Mark to Market" valuation in order to set an Investment Amount for the new shares (the ones being received).  When you click ENTER on this transaction, it automatically generates a "Remove Shares" transaction for ALL shares held in the OLD mutual fund plus multiple "Add Shares" transactions for the NEW mutual fund -- one for each Lot purchased in the old mutual fund.  (I do not use the Average Cost feature for securities, so I don't know if individual Lots are preserved if that box is checked.)  Each of these Add Shares transactions reflects (correctly so) the Total Cost and Date Acquired of the original Lot, but with a different share count based on the exchange ratio of new shares to old.

(Example B continued...) The tricky part in Mutual Fund Conversion is two-fold:  First, Quicken attempts to record the "market value" of the removed shares in the Remove Shares transaction.  Weirdly, this field only shows in the register when a register line item is selected -- it does not show and cannot be entered in the Remove Shares transaction dialog window!   I have found that Quicken records the WRONG value in this field during Mutual Fund Conversion, using a per share price equal to the total market value on the date of exchange -- usually resulting in a valuation that is thousands or millions of dollars too high!   I always go back and re-enter that value in the Remove Shares transaction (the calculator pop-up is handy here) -- the correct value is the number of shares removed multiplied by the closing share price on that day.  In other words, Total Market Value of the old shares being exchanged. 
  
(Example B continued...) The second trick is that Quicken simultaneously and secretly records a market valuation within each of the Add Shares transactions that it creates for the newly acquired fund.  These values correctly show in the Investment Amount column (Investment Performance report) and reflect the value of the new fund shares on the date of the fund exchange.  
Consequently, the value of the Removed Shares (shown in the Returns column of the Investment Performance report) should equal the sum of the valuations from the Add Shares transactions (shown in the Investment Amount column).  Yes, they cancel each other out as far as cost of this exchanged investment is concerned.  Though the share count has likely changed as a result of the exchange, the new shares are supposed to have the exact same total market value as the removed shares.  Thus, there is a net zero impact on the "performance" of your holding on that date and the report accurately reflects this. This is why the Mutual Fund Conversion transaction asks for "Price per share of new mutual fund (after conversion)".  That price (automatically recorded in price history tables I think) is used to compute the Investment Amount for each "Add Shares" transaction (which, as we now know, is very different than Cost Basis).  And we also now know that this Investment Amount is hidden within the Add Shares transaction and WILL NOT CHANGE even if the Add Shares transaction is later edited. (One additional report detail to remember: If your report date range spans any original Lot acquisitions of the old mutual fund, those acquisition transactions and their associated actual Basis Cost will be shown and correctly reflected in performance stats!) 


Hopefully this helps shed light on a very convoluted Quicken feature.  If anybody has any corrections to my observations, please let me know.  Thanks!   Because of apparent interest, I will also post this as a separate topic using the title that is the first line in this post.

Jim_Harman

Thanks for your thorough analysis. I basically agree with your conclusions.

Note that the stand-alone Add transaction appears to have been been fixed in QWin 2018, so that the Investment amount is now recorded as the number of shares times the price on the date of the Add, not the cost basis. In QWin 2017 the Add worked OK if it was generated automatically by a Shares transferred between accounts, but not if you entered it on its own.

A related problem in earlier versions was that a Remove transaction would sometimes produce an outlandish number for the Return value. I think it was using the share price times the square of the number of shares or something like that. This of course would lead to crazy results in the Investment Performance report. A work-around for this (Use at your own risk! Do a backup first!) is that you can see and edit the Return value it is using if you select the Remove transaction in the transaction list. The value is shown in the Action column just below the "Removed." This also appears to have been fixed in QWin 2018 but I have not tested it extensively.

I have not seen the problem you describe in item 5A (performance tracking with partial sales)

smutschler

Jim, likewise, I agree with all your posts regarding these issues.  I re-tested the 5A "partial sales" reporting issue and indeed was unable to reproduce it.  It was either fixed at some point or I was mistaken in my past observations.  Accordingly, I have appended a correction to my related post titled Beware: "Add Shares" transactions...   Thank you!