Fidelity vs. Vanguard - Transaction Types Best Practices

unknown

Hi,
Thanks in advance for the help. I'm ready to pull my hair out.

I have 2 Employer Sponsored Retirement Accounts, a Fidelity 401k, and an old Vanguard Employer Simple IRA. The simple IRA technically is 5 separate single mutual fund accounts, but Vanguard sends down the data as different holdings in a single account.

My problem:

I really like how Fidelity sends down all the transactions as BoughtX and SoldX. This prevents me from having to book oodles of deposits (in my employer sponsored accounts I could care less about the source of the cash). The BoughtX and Soldx transactions use the same account as the source of the cash (i.e. in account 'FideltityWork', I have BoughtXs, with 'Use Cash for this Transaction' from 'FidelityWork'.) While you would think this would just act as a buy it books the buy without moving cash from anywhere, solving my booking deposits problem.

With Vanguard to avoid booking deposits I converted all the bought transactions to 'Added' but that seems (I could be wrong) to throw off a lot of the Quicken reporting. So, I went to convert all the added transactions in Vanguard to BoughtX and SoldX like I have in my Fidelity account. For some funds however, the 'Use Cash From' Box doesn't appear in the edit transactions box, so I can't make the changes across the entire account.

What should I do in Vanguard? Should I go back to 'Added'? Should I convert everything to Bought / Sold and manually book all the Deposits? Is there some trick that will allow me to finish converting all the Boughts to BoughtXs??? How does the 'Use Cash From' box just disappear?

Please help!!!

Thanks in advance,
-Adrian

P.S. I am aware of the Gross paycheck functionality and have had so much trouble with it I am opposed to going down that road again.

Jim_Harman

You don't say what version of Quicken you are using. in QWin 2017 and I think earlier versions there is a problem with some Adds where the performance tracking is incorrect. This is fixed in QWin 2018.

If you want the best practice, it would be to bite the bullet and set up your paycheck so that the retirement account contributions are transfers to the appropriate investment account(s). This will give Quicken a chance to put everything into the correct tax bucket. The corresponding cash should show up in the cash balance of your investing accounts. Then in the investing accounts, you should see Buys (often a few weeks later) where the cash is used to purchase the securities you have selected.