Multiple Capital Gains Accounts?

Unknown

New to QW2017. Here's my second question. In the software I used before, I could create multiple capital gains accounts. This was useful for tracking gains resulting from different sources of advice. For example, you could set up an account like "ST Gains-Investment Newsletter." As far as I can tell, there is only one LT and one ST account in Q that operates "invisibly". Also as far as I can tell there is no way to add tags to investment transactions. So if I wanted to track a specific category of capital gains, is there any way to do it? Thanks for any thoughts.

NotACPA

Any investment gain, in Q, is an income item (i.e., a category) ... not an account.

So, see if you can do a transfer FROM the generic ST Gains category to your selected category.

K.O. (Win-Premier)

I do not believe there is any way to do what you are looking for.  Tags would be great for this (and I've put the suggestion in before to allow tags for investment transactions) so that you can track performance separately based on advice, or investment strategy, or how ever the user wanted to break up their investments.

Also note that while there is a "capital gains" report it is probably better titled investment gain/loss by time period because it does not accurately reflect your capital gains from a tax reporting perspective (even though you might assume it does).  It does not accurately account for short positions, covered calls/puts, section 1256 positions, nor wash sales so be warned that you should not count on it if for tax projecting/reporting if any of these situations apply to your investments.

q_lurker

IMO, you best representation for this would be to use the memo field.  You would then use the Investment Transactions report customized to the specific memo field keywords you choose (Category tab customization).  That report will not break out LT and ST components of the sales.  Your customization might be for Actions = _RlzdGains and Memo contains 'XYZNewsletter'.  This will not be ideal for your question but might go in the right direction.  Note that only two Investment Reports (Income and Transactions) allow for filtering based on the memo field.  You can get similar information from Banking Transactions reports or Spending reports with the accounts expanded or customized to include the investment accounts.  Sometimes the non-investment reports offer more flexibility. 

You could pair that with purchase transactions customized similarly, if that might be of interest.  

There are some wildcards that can be used with the memo field specification.  Search the help file for "filter reports"

Unknown

Thanks everyone for your replies!

@NotACPA
- Nice idea but I'm not sure how to do that since Q calculates and applies the gain (or loss) in the background either to ST or LT gain. Even if I created a category such as "ST Gains - Newsletter A" how would I get any realized gains to go there?

@Kevin Osborn - Yeah I think tags would be the best. Although I am a beginning user of Quicken I have used similar software for 30 years. Hopefully the powers that be at Quicken will listen to your suggestion! I fully understand that the gains that Quicken calculates may not be the same for tax purposes. I just go with the year end brokerage statement. My old software separately tracked your cost basis and tax basis, which are usually the same. But you could easily adjust either, so gains would be calculated on tax basis while still keeping a record of the purchase price. The biggest shortcoming of Q that I have found is that there is no easy way to adjust the basis of an investment. However I am pleased that after much wrestling with the program, I was able to get my CG to match to the penny what my brokerage is reporting!

@q.lurker
- This is a very creative suggestion! The problem is that when the brokerage transactions are  downloaded they are populated with various memos. So I would have to edit every transaction, which is contrary to why I decided to switch to Quicken. (After using the same software for 30 years this has been quite traumatic!) So if this was a "must-have" feature for me I think your method would work.  I'm just not motivated to go back to my old method of spending many hours every month manually entering investment transactions. I think I'll just hope that at some point Q allows tags to be added to investment transactions. I would certainly pay for an upgrade that added that feature! But overall I'm really pleased that I switched to Quicken. I can get along without the investment tracking in exchange for the hours it will save me every month.

Thanks again!