QWin 2017 Premier: Interest income recorded as Dividend income.

Thomas

I'm new to Premier 2017 this year. My investment account transactions are automatically downloaded into Quicken, but all my Money Market Interest payments are shown in Quicken as Dividends instead of Interest. What do I need to do to show these interest payments as interest?

Bob_L

But aren’t they in fact dividends?

NotACPA

Money Market Fund payments can be either Interest or Dividends ... depending upon the corporate structure of the fund.

If your Fund Company is downloading them as dividends ... I'd tend to suspect that they're correct.

Bobalaska

http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/060116/are-money-market-dividends-qualified.asp

If a money market mutual fund, they generally pay dividends, just like other mutual funds.

Unknown

In fact I really don't even see why it would matter.
(I do think everyone is right and they are dividends)

Interest and dividends are taxed in the exact same way with the exception of qualified dividends, which I doubt these are, but even if they were Quicken doesn't do anything different for qualified dividends.  You have to sort them out in your tax program.

Vetta

NotACPA's answer is correct. If they are in a brokerage account they are probably dividends; you can always check that easily enough.

Thomas

Thanks everyone. My brokerage (TD AMERITRADE) reports these payments as Interest on my form 1099 every year.The amounts are really inconsequential, but I'd really like my Quicken Tax Reports to be identical to my 1099.

NotACPA

Thomas said:

Thanks everyone. My brokerage (TD AMERITRADE) reports these payments as Interest on my form 1099 every year.The amounts are really inconsequential, but I'd really like my Quicken Tax Reports to be identical to my 1099.

Curious.  You're saying that TDA reports on the 1099 as Interest ... yet downloads as Dividends? 

Because it's what's in the download from TDA that determines Int vs Div.  Q doesn't make that determination ... it just reports what's sent.

You might try taking a look in the OFX Log to see what's there.  HELP, Log Files, OFX Log.  Save it to your desktop,  and then open it with NotePad or WordPad (NOT MS Word).

Do a search for the amount (without any dollar sign) and then look before that  amount for the label TRNTYPE.  What follows that is TDA's downloaded action.

Also, what fund?  Because we can look it up and do a bit of research.  AND, has the fund been changed (from another fund) recently?

Unknown

Thomas said:

Thanks everyone. My brokerage (TD AMERITRADE) reports these payments as Interest on my form 1099 every year.The amounts are really inconsequential, but I'd really like my Quicken Tax Reports to be identical to my 1099.

Well in that case you should be complaining to TD AMERITRADE.
They are the ones that control both the 1099 and what is sent to Quicken.

All investment accounts can only be imported with Web Connect (a QFX file) or Direct Connect.  Both of which come directly from your financial institution (Express Web Connect that uses Intuit servers doesn't support investment accounts).

If you want it differently in Quicken, and TD AMERITRADE doesn't fix the problem, the only way you can fix it would be to edit every one of these transaction they send down to interest instead of dividend.

Thomas

Upon closer examination, TDA classifies the account as an Insured Deposit Acct, and that's why the income is interest and not dividend. They have a separate account type they call Money Market, and the income from that account would probably be reported as Dividends on my 1099.

This doesn't explain why the transactions are reported to Quicken as Dividends, and I'm pretty sure that is in fact a TDA problem.

NotACPA.....I downloaded the OFX file, but the search returned nothing. It appears that there are no Investment Account transactions in that file, only Banking transactions.

Thanks again everybody. I think I'll just tell TDA to shift my cash into their actual Money Market fund. They'll report the income as Dividends, and that ought to solve my problem.

markus1957

From a practical standpoint, what I do is edit the transaction(s) and cut/paste the amount to the Interest box. I do this with all non-QDI amounts downloaded from FIs as dividends so that my tax owed projections in tax planner are more accurate. I'm not so interested in matching a tax report to the FIs 1099 because I download that 1099 info directly from the FI; my objective is to manage my tax burden as efficiently as possible using Tax Planner.

NotACPA

Thomas said:

Upon closer examination, TDA classifies the account as an Insured Deposit Acct, and that's why the income is interest and not dividend. They have a separate account type they call Money Market, and the income from that account would probably be reported as Dividends on my 1099.

This doesn't explain why the transactions are reported to Quicken as Dividends, and I'm pretty sure that is in fact a TDA problem.

NotACPA.....I downloaded the OFX file, but the search returned nothing. It appears that there are no Investment Account transactions in that file, only Banking transactions.

Thanks again everybody. I think I'll just tell TDA to shift my cash into their actual Money Market fund. They'll report the income as Dividends, and that ought to solve my problem.

See if you've got an OFXOLD.TXT file.  HELP, Log Files, OFX Log ... and then in the lower left corner switch to "Old Log".

If it was downloaded ... then it MUST be in a Log File somewhere.  That's just how it works.

Unknown

Thomas said:

Upon closer examination, TDA classifies the account as an Insured Deposit Acct, and that's why the income is interest and not dividend. They have a separate account type they call Money Market, and the income from that account would probably be reported as Dividends on my 1099.

This doesn't explain why the transactions are reported to Quicken as Dividends, and I'm pretty sure that is in fact a TDA problem.

NotACPA.....I downloaded the OFX file, but the search returned nothing. It appears that there are no Investment Account transactions in that file, only Banking transactions.

Thanks again everybody. I think I'll just tell TDA to shift my cash into their actual Money Market fund. They'll report the income as Dividends, and that ought to solve my problem.

BTW the field that you would be looking for is <INCOMETYPE>.  In this case it would be set to DIV, but for interest it should be set to INTEREST.