Mutual fund conversion from Class B to Class A. Quicken 2014

Why is Mutual Fund conversions not the right function?

Either MF Conversion or Corporate Acquisition should do the basic task, but MF Conversion should be easier. There have been some issues with MF conversion, but I don't recall the specifics at this time.

As to only some of your shares being converted, you have to address this by converting all shares (the standard conversion), then editing the generated Remove Shares transaction to cut down to and specify actual shares being converted. Then also delete the generated Add Shares transactions that were associated with the non-converted original shares.

Just this month I had this scenario with five of my mutual funds. Most of my class C shares were converted to class A, but a small number of shares of each fund remained as class C.

The problem is that the Mutual Fund Conversion transaction only converts all shares from one class to another.

My solution to this was to first use a Remove Shares transaction for the remaining class C shares first with a trade date one day before the conversion. I then entered the Mutual Fund Conversion transaction for the balance of the shares according to my trade confirmation on the date it occurred.

Afterwards, I deleted the Remove Shares transaction I temporarily entered prior to the conversion and balanced the shares and market values to my statement, everything worked out near perfectly.

The only thing I had to do was modify one converted lot of converted shares at the 6th decimal position, to balance the shares to my account statement to adjust for a share rounding discrepancy.

That is a good approach, I would think. I had usually suggested taking the full conversion results, then editing the Remove that action generated to leave the Class C lot unspecified, and deleting the inappropriate Add Shares generated for that lot as Class A shares. I like your technique better.

Thanks for posting it,

PS, you may also need to edit the Market Value (I think it is) for the Remove Shares transaction within the transaction list.

Thanks, nice to hear you like my approach. The only issue I had is that the share balance of the new class had a miniscule difference from my brokerage statement due to rounding. Instead of 100 shares for example, the result was 99.999994, so I just modified the shares of one lot by adding .000006 so it would balance perfectly.

I had to do this for five funds, so once I worked this out for one, the rest were a piece of cake.

It would be nice if the Mutual Fund Conversion dialogue allowed you to specify a partial share conversion.

unknown

I am using Quicken 2016. I just dealt with this when I had a partial Class B to Class A conversion. The simplest approach is to use the Mutual Fund Conversion function. In the transaction dialog box, enter the transaction date of the actual conversion, the name of the old fund and the name of the new fund after conversion. For the "Shares of new Fund" field, enter the actual number of shares of the new fund received on the conversion date, including any fractional shares. Quicken will use a first in, first out approach to convert shares of the old fund to the new fund, and stop when the number of new shares added to your account matches the:amount you entered in the "Shares of new Fund" field.

At the beginning of the transaction register entries for the conversion, Quicken will enter a "Shares removed" transaction for the entire amount of the pre-conversion shares you had in your account. You just need to edit this register entiry for the actual number of old shares that were converted to the new shares.

I agree that your approach is an equally simple way to solve the problem and I will try that in the future. In either case we had to use the Remove Shares transaction as a workaround to get the partial class conversion we needed.

I would like to see Quicken add Shares of old to the Mutual Fund Conversion dialog so that this transaction can be entered without any further manual adjustments on the end users part.

@David Toelkes

I disagree. For the MF conversion, Quicken removes all shares of the original holding (as you also note), and Add Shares for as many as you indicated you received. As it adds in the new shares, it is using a conversion ratio based on new shares you indicated and old shares in the account -- 100% of those old shares. One new Add Share lot is created for every lot of the original holding using that computed conversion ratio. If in the real world only a portion of those old shares are being converted, the share ratio conversion will be incorrect and every newly added lot will be incorrect.

Perhaps you did a Corporate Acquisition transaction which is an alternate to the MF conversion and works on a user defined share conversion ratio.

Good point about the share ratio, I will stick with my original approach in that case, as my ratio will be correct.

Dear Rich M SuperUser -- can you explain again the process you used here. I understand you first use Remove Shares to eliminate the shares that did not transfer to the new share class. However, how did you then "put them back" so you still have them in your account?

Sherlock

Scott M: After you complete the conversion, the shares are put back by deleting the Removed transactions you entered to temporarily remove these shares.

If you can tell me how best to remove the shares from date X to present, then I think I will be able to do the entire process as you suggest. Thanks

@Scott M:

You need to separately determine the total quantity of all shares NOT being converted.

Then enter a Remove Shares transaction for that number of shares and choose to specify lots. The lot specification prompt should present the lots ordered by date, so it is likely the ones not being converted would be at the end of the list (most recent lots). You would check off those lots as the ones to Remove (so they would not be converted).

Then do the MF conversion which would apply to the shares NOT removed.

After the conversion, delete the Remove Shares transaction you created (not the one created by the MF Conversion) that had temporarily removed the unconverted shares. Those unconverted shares will be restored to your holdings.

Got it. That makes total sense. I would have never thought you could remove shares and then bring them back by deleting the transaction. I will next check to make sure Q 2018 commands work this way and then try that. Thank you.

One final recommendation ... Backup your data file first ... let us know how it all works out.

Yes I always do the back ups. It may take me a week or two to get to it. I will let you know how it works. Thanks.