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Add ability to Buy/Sell investments AND Transfer in single transaction (27 Legacy Votes)

smayer97

In QM2007 (and in QWin) there is the ability to perform a BUY/SELL of investments AND to transfer the cash to /from another account as a single transaction. Currently in QMac this requires 2 separate transactions.

The problem is that this creates a problem as combined transactions in QM2007 and QWin do not convert correctly, losing data and causing errors in the balances of investment accounts, etc.

Please either restore this capability in QMac and/or handle the conversion correctly.

If you find this feature helpful, please be sure to click "VOTE" below to increase the count of this post.

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Status: Planned

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smayer97

This IDEA has been added to the List of Requests Related to Investments and the List of Requests for Data Entry and Usability Options and Features. You may want to click on each underlined link, then follow the instructions to add your vote to more related ideas.

(If you find this reply helpful, please be sure to click "Like", so others will know, thanks.)

unknown

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled Why Can't You Engage in Double Entry Bookkeeping With Investments?.

Frustrated Quicken for Mac 2007 user, here.... Why in the world have none of the new Quicken versions (2015, 2016, or now 2017) contained double-entry bookkeeping for investment accounts? When I sell shares in a brokerage account, that generates cash. That cash often is directly used in another account to purchase shares of a different security.

If you have Vanguard accounts, for example, you might sell shares in your plain, vanilla brokerage account -- perhaps Money Market shares -- in order to buy shares in your IRA. In Q2007, you could enter this as a SELL transaction (which is accurate) in your brokerage account, and then under "category," just put the name of the IRA account in brackets. That created an input in the IRA account ledger, which you could fill out with a BUY as needed. So elegant, so simple.

With Q2017, you need to essentially create two dummy transactions to accomplish the same thing, one which states "Add Shares" (to the IRA) and one which states "Remove Shares" (to the brokerage). This is dumb, and inaccurate in terms of tracking how the money is flowing.

PLEASE ADD THIS FUNCTIONALITY BACK INTO QUICKEN 2017! YOU HAD IT 10 YEARS AGO. WHY WOULD YOU REMOVE IT???

smayer97

The functionality has not been removed. QMac has been rewritten from the ground up starting with QEM released back in 2010 and this is one of the features that they have not added back in yet. There are many competing priorities and literally hundreds of features to be built back in. This takes time and the votes help to priorities which features to focus on.

(If you find this reply helpful, please be sure to click "Like", so others will know, thanks.)

unknown

It is true that in Quicken Mac 2017 you have to create two transactions...but they are NOT Add Shares and Remove Shares.

In your investment account, you SELL shares to create a cash amount. Then you use a PAYMENT/DEPOSIT transaction type to transfer the cash to the other account.

The category is irrelevant...but it CAN be different than the transfer account.

The key here is to make sure that the investment register(s) have the TRANSFER column showing in the register.

One of the cool things with Quicken Mac is that you can have a transfer AND a different category.

For example, I make monthly withdrawals from an investment account. I create a SELL transaction, which gives me a cash balance in the investment account register. I then have to create a PAYMENT/DEPOSIT transaction, categorize it as "Retirement Income" (which can have a tax line associated with that category) AND I have a transfer to my checking account...all on one line of the transaction.

If this isn't clear, please let me know and I can further explain.

jacobs

Hopeful1, I hate to be the bearer of bad news for you, but they actually recently closed the transfer + category loophole in Quicken 2018. It is now the way Quicken has worked in the past on Mac and, I think on Windows as well: a transaction can be an income/expense category or it can be a funds transfer between accounts, but it can't be both at the same time. This is more proper from an accounting standpoint, but I know some people have found it useful.

The problem was that in your example, the Retirement Income didn't end up showing as income on reports; it showed up as "Other Transactions > Transfers Between Accounts". You might see it on a tax report, but if you do other reports, it's not showing as income as you'd expect or want. (For instance, if they're creating an Income Statement report, as many have asked for, they needed to fix this loophole.) So as much as it was helpful in some cases, it created confusion in other places, and I assume that's why they changed it.

(Side note: I don't have any of those transactions in my data file, but I don't know what it does to them if you do when you upgrade to Quicken 2018. When I have time, I'll try adding a transaction like that to a test 2017 data file and then opening it in 2018 to see whether it changes it or leaves it alone.)

J_Mike

@jacobs

Am running latest version of QMac and am very interested in monitoring near termcash flow.

I do take monthly retirement distributions - a transfer from the retirement account to checking.
I do categorize this transfer with an Income subcategory.
Using New Reports > Transaction Report > Subtotal by Category;
The transfer(s) do report as a subcat of Income.
With All Accounts selected, both halves of the transfer report and cancel each other - net zero to Income.
With the retirement account excluded, the transfer to checking reports as Income - as desired.

I also categorize other transfers - credit card payments, mortgage principal and escrow payments. etc.
By proper selection of accounts to include/exclude, I do get a good representation of cash flow. The transfers all report under the assigned Income/Expense categories - as desired.

I have not seen any recent change in the report behavior (using the New Reports template).

Bottom line - I do find the categorization of transfers to be a very useful tool in monitoring cash flow. The New Reports template works quite well in this regard. The old Category Summary Report was problematic in handling categorized transfers.

jacobs

JM, the change is in the way to can categorize a transaction, and upon further testing, my previous post wasn't completely correct, and the situation is more muddled than I thought.

I was under the impression that in Quicken 5.7.2, if any transaction is a transfer, it cannot have a category, and if it has a category, it can't be a transfer. Here's why...

Create a test transaction in your checking account with a transfer to another account, say "Amex". Note that the Category field show "Transfer:[Amex]". Now, double click to edit the transaction, and change the Category field to an expense category, say Dining. When you tab out of the Category field, the Transfer disappears from the Transfer field and the other account -- it's no longer a transfer transaction. This happens whether you edit the Category in the original (parent) account or the receiving (child) account. So let's go back to my original transaction entered in my checking account as a transfer to my Amex account. If I go to the transaction in the Amex account and edit the Category to be Dining, once again the transfer disappears: the transaction remains in the Amex account and disappears from the checking account. This part is new behavior. When I go back to Quicken 2017 to test, this does not happen.

But after reading your post and doing further testing, I discovered there is a loophole -- and I don't know whether it's intentional or an omission when they updated the code to do what I described above. In this case, create a test transaction in the checking account, and this time assign it a category of Dining from the start. Save the transaction. Now edit it to add a transfer to Amex in the Transfer field. Lo and behold, you can save this transaction with both a category and transfer, just as you could before.

To summarize: if you create a transaction an enter a Category first, before you enter a transfer in the transfer column, the transaction can be a transfer and category at the same time. But if you do the opposite -- enter an account in the Transfer column first, and then select what's in the Category field and enter your own Category, it will wipe out the transfer. So, for now at least, to have a transaction as both a Category and a Transfer, you must be sure to enter the Category before you enter the Transfer; if you enter the Transfer first and then enter a Category, the Category will eliminate the Transfer.

To me, this seems like an error. The order you enter fields in a transaction should not create different outcomes. If Quicken intends to make it that transfers can't also have categories, then they have partially but not fully blocked this in the latest update.

unknown

All that info is great...however the OP did specify they are using Quicken Mac 2017.

unknown

Another question...since I have categories AND transfers in some of my transactions, what happen when I upgrade to Quicken Mac 2018?

Will I have to re-categorize ALL of those transfer transactions as solely transfers...or will have to change all the categories to "transfer categories"?

Any help here would be appreciated.

jacobs

Yup, my reply about the changes in Quicken 2018 were directed to you, since you said you used this functionality; I just wanted to give you a heads up if/when you update to 2018 or beyond.

unknown

Correction: Quicken Mac 2007. I feel like you guys are talking about a totally different issue. I'm just looking for a simple way to show that once you sell the shares in an investment account, that money can be transferred to a different investment account. In Quicken Mac 2007, you could have a SELL transaction that resulted in a transfer to a separate account -- and in that other account's ledger, you could alter the (double-entry bookkeeping-generated) transaction to BUY shares there. Simple and easy. I have no idea what you guys are talking about. Seems complicated.

jacobs

Nancy, ignore the last few posts and go back to re-read @Hopeful1's first response to your original post. It *is* different in the modern Quicken for Mac, but it's not really problematic for most people to enter two transactions, a Sell and then a transfer of funds.

You're calling this a lack of double-entry bookkeeping, but it's not. A sell transactor is, in accounting terms, a credit to the security and a debit to cash in your investment account. A transfer transaction is a debit to cash in the receiving account and a credit to cash in the selling account. Quicken doesn't use this accounting terminology, but it really is double-entry bookkeeping. It just doesn't let you do the two steps in one transaction like Quicken 2007 did.

J_Mike

@jacobs

Ok - I now see this odd behavior. I had not attempted to create a new categorized transfer in some time - my transactions are all scheduled and were created some time ago.

As to the question - Is this "work-around" an unintentional loophole? I certainly hope not.
Example: The ability to categorize transfers is absolutely essential for entering retirement account contributions and/or distributions. It is the ability to assign a tax related category to a transfer that identifies this movement of cash as tax related.

@Hopeful1

Upgrading to QMac2018 should not present any problems with respect to existing categorized transfers. I am on 2018 and these past transactions carried over satisfactorily.

jacobs

JM, so how did you do this in Quicken 2007, when it was impossible to have a transaction which was both a transfer and categorized income/expense?

J_Mike

I was (still am) a QWin user.

QWin assigns tax line items to transfers in and out of the retirement account.
This works ok for most users but one runs into problems if you make both Pre-tax and After-tax contributions to the same retirement account. Same if you have distributions that are a mix of taxable and non-taxable funds (e.g., a Roth 401k).
For these issues, one has to devise some convoluted workarounds to get proper tax reporting in QWin.

QMac can handle these quiet readily - simply requires a split transaction with the proper categories.

The categorized transfer feature is one of the areas where I feel that QMac has leap-frogged well past QWin in functionality. I certainly hope they are not striving for "parity" by retreating in this case.

smayer97

Please stop hijacking this thread... it has nothing to do with it. Next time, please wait until a mod forks an unrelated response before taking a thread completely off topic.

smayer97

BTW, this may be an important problem that relates to a recent change made in QM2018 v5.7.2, so it definitely warrants a new thread.

jacobs

@smayer97, I’m not sure which of us you’re chastising, but I’d note that all the conversation in this thread over the past few days was spurred by a post that a moderator transferred TO this thread. Also, I think it is relevant to the goal of the original topic, which now has an additional wrinkle.

1200flasher

One feature I miss from the 2007 Quicken on Mac is to have a unified screen to both receive a dividend into a portfolio and send it to a specific account. I'm not a power user and find my only option is to deposit the dividend in the portfolio then transfer it to where the brokerage puts the funds. I can do that, but it makes for more places to introduce an error...wrong date...digit reversal...other ways I can screw it up...etc.

Am I missing a better way to handle dividends that don't stay in the portfolio, but are deposited elsewhere?

jacobs

@1200flasher Your Idea request has been merged into this existing request for this functionality. Here's the good news: the developers have marked it "Planned", meaning they have committed to adding this feature and have it on their development roadmap. And the bad news: it's been marked planned for more than a year and hasn't yet been implemented. We never know where each feature enhancement ranks on their priority list, and they never say when a particular feature is planned, because the plans and timing are ever-changing.

Until that functionality is added, you are correct that you need to enter two separate transactions: one to record the dividend and one to transfer the cash proceed to a different account.

1200flasher

Thanks for the information. When it appears, I'll be happy.

Wade Shanley

how do I vote for this? I don't see the vote button. switching from Windows to Mac this is the most glaring deficiency I noticed...there are many but this one drove me nuts trying to fix it.

Quicken Kristina

Hello All,

The status of this Idea has been changed to Under Consideration as it has been resubmitted to our Product and Development team for further review.

Thank you!

Quicken Jasmine

Hello All,

The status of this Idea has been changed to Planned as it has been accepted by our Product and Development team for future implementation. However, Quicken's product development teams do not provide an estimate of when new/enhanced features will be completed and released.

Thank you!

MontanaKarl

I just came across this thread. I'm sorry to see that this is "planned" as it is totally unnecessary and the way Quicken Mac handles things with two separate transactions is in my opinion the correct way. There are far more important things to include in QMac than adding a capability that is not needed.

Jon

I see this as being similar to the "Reinvested Dividend" transaction - you can record reinvested dividends with separate Dividend & Purchase transactions but it's nice to be able to combine them into one. Also, if it fixes a problem converting from QWin to QMac, that's worth addressing IMO.

Probably not something I'll use myself since I want make sure transfers settle before using the money to buy something. The one time I tried to purchase a mutual fund with money from another account the transfer didn't go through & the broker wound up selling off other investments to fund the purchase before I could find another way to get the money transferred. Not a scenario I wish to repeat.

MontanaKarl

I see your point, Jon, but don't see why it is an issue with converting from QWin…. the conversion code just has to convert the one split into two transactions. Same net result.

Chris_QPW

For what it is worth, I see Reinvested Dividend differently than BuyX/SellX for the only reason that for Reinvest Dividend the financial institution might actually encode it combined or not combined. But they will never actually have a combined action of BuyX/SellX, it will always be two separate transactions.

In my opinion BuyX/SellX is just another "wizard" or convenience feature. It helps speed up manual entry.

Note that @Jon 's case were there was a transfer problem, doesn't actually reflect on the use of BuyX. As I said, this isn't really what the financial institution is doing and isn't even what it would send to Quicken is you downloaded such transactions. The fact that the transfer and when (or if) the money will show up is the classic problem of any transfer. "Linked transfers" all have the same problem. They are convenient, but they don't reflect the real world. If I make a payment to my credit card, it actually is posted in the credit card account a day or two before it is posted in my checking account. Given that it is a linked transfer the dates are the same, but that isn't what really happened.

I agree with @MontanaKarl the real problem to solve is the conversion. This is the same kind of thing as the "Linked cash account" that Quicken Windows supports for brokerage accounts and Quicken Mac doesn't. This feature was created in Quicken Windows as a convenience feature because of the limited features in Quicken Windows investment registers. So, a proper conversion should be done, but one shouldn't insist on a one-to-one conversion.

Biz

I have dividends in my brokerage account that are auto transferred to my checking account elsewhere. I now have to post a Dividend entry, then post a Payment to reflect the transfer to my checking AC elsewhere. Why don't you offer one transaction to reflect that…Years back I was on a Windows version and it was available, but never for Mac. Why not?

jacobs

@Biz A moderator has merged your Idea post into this existing thread for the same functionality.

The good news is that the status of that Idea thread (at the top of this page) is marked as "Planned" by the development team:

The bad news: as always, we have no idea when particular "Planned" features will actually make it to the top of the development queue and get implemented.