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.

mshiggins

What problems did you have with the paycheck feature?

Unknown

Thanks for the responses. I'm on Quicken 2018 by the way (edited the original post to include). My main complaint with the Paycheck feature was its inflexibility. My pay was variable for a while and I found it very difficult to edit any paycheck that wasn't the most recent. I also had problems with matching to downloaded transactions, this was in Quicken versions 2016 and 2017.

Going back to the paycheck feature is something I would consider, but is more of a wishlist item to getting my historical data in this Vanguard account locked down (which is now closed).

Why is the "Use cash for this transaction" option only available on some buys? I've converted 80% of my Boughts to BoughtXs but for the last 20% of the transaction the option to specify cash source just isn't there. It'd really be nice if the documentation was better.

Jim_Harman

Have you checked the account for Placeholders? I think they may affect this setting.

Unknown

BIngo. I had two hidden placeholders.

Had to go to edit Preferences and enable showing hidden investment transactions. Found the two placeholders and the dupe transactions necessitating the share adjustments. Deleted the placeholders and dupes, and was able to flip the rest of my Boughts to BoughtXs.

My Investment Performance report and Growth of $10k reports are now far more reasonable and actually useful. Thanks Jim!!!