Growth of $10,000: deposits and withdrawals handled incorrectly

Jim_Harman

QWin 2019 R15.18 (but I think this problem has been present for a long time)

Depositing or withdrawing cash from an investing account should not affect the Investing > Growth of $10,000 graph, especially if you select "All securities." The graph IMO should show the performance of the securities in the account and should be the same as it is when you transfer cash into or out of the account rather than depositing or withdrawing.

To see the correct behavior, select an account that has a large XIn or XOut transaction. Set the date range to the 1st to the last day of a month with one of these transactions. Select All Securities.

There will not be a large jump in the Growth of $10,000 graph on the transfer date. If you hover over the data point for the transfer date, the "Actual Value" will change but there will be a "Cumul. Net Addition" corresponding to the transfer amount. Thus the graph is affected by the performance of the investments in the account and not by cash transferred in or out.

To see the incorrect behavior, set up the same but look at a date with a large Deposit, Withdraw, or WriteChk transaction. There will be a corresponding jump in the graph, and if you hover over the data point, the "Actual Value" will change but there is no offsetting amount in the "Cumul. Net Additions."

This problem makes the otherwise very useful Growth of $10,000 graph incorrect for any account that has had deposits and withdrawals. 

Quicken Sarah

Hi Jim,

Thank you for taking the time to report this.  I've gone through the information provided a few times, the in-product Help article and troubleshooting in my own file and to be honest, I feel like I am missing something.

From the explanation of how the growth is calculated, it appears that the Deposit/Withdraw/WriteChk transactions should not be included in the "Cumul. Net Addition" balance, only the XIn/XOut transactions but the Deposit/Withdraw/WriteChk transactions should correlate to the jump in the graph point on the Growth of $10,000 graph; which is exactly what I am seeing in my test file.

 

  


From my current understanding, the graph does seem to be calculating correctly but if I am missing something, or you are experiencing different behavior, please let me know.

Thanks,

Sarah

K.O. (Win-Premier)

Honestly I've given up on this report because after many attempts it is still not correct.  But I got lured back in by following Jim's post.

The growth of 10K should be an apples to apples comparison w/ the market indices.  This means that nothing other than increases or decreases related to securities should be include.  So no deposits, withdrawals, or transfers in either direction should be included.

I can't understand in the explanation why transfers should show on the graph when deposits/withdrawals do not.  There is no difference as both are just a increase or decrease in cash due to the user adding or removing money from the account and thus are not related to the performance of the account in comparison to the market indices.  The market indices don't include any addition or subtraction due to more funds being added or withdrawn (due to buys or sells in the market) so the graph of the users account shouldn't either.

Arctic Hare

Only transfers-in-kind of securities should come into play; transfers in/out of cash should not come into play.

Jim_Harman

Thanks for looking into this, Sarah.

I agree that it handles the XIns and XOuts correctly, as described in your highlighted text in the Help. But the "e.g." in the Help indicates that those transactions are examples. The Help unfortunately does not say anything about Deposits, Withdrawals, and WriteChecks.

I think it should handle Deposits, Withdrawals, and WriteChecks in exactly the same way as it does XIns and XOuts, and that adding or removing cash from the account should have no impact on the performance, regardless of how the cash was added or removed. 

Your example shows a net increase in cash of $25,000 on 11/8 but the "Cumul. Net Addition" is only showing as $5,500, which is the net of the XIns and XOuts and does not include the Deposits and Withdraws. Because the account value has increased by $25,000, the "Growth" has jumped up.

Here are screenshots from another example, with the time scale expanded and transactions on different days so you can see their impact on the graph. In this example the XYZ Fund has a constant price of $11.00 for the month of September.





As you can see the Deposit, Withdrawal, and WriteChk made the graph jump up and down on the 5th, 10th, and 15th, but the XIn and XOut on the 20th and 25th correctly have no effect on the graph.

Note I have reported this elsewhere as BR-001400.

Thanks again for looking into this. I think Quicken has behaved this way for a long time, but the Growth of $10,000 would be much more useful if the calculations were not thrown off by deposits, withdrawals, and checks.

Jim_Harman

K.O. (Win-Premier) said:

Honestly I've given up on this report because after many attempts it is still not correct.  But I got lured back in by following Jim's post.

The growth of 10K should be an apples to apples comparison w/ the market indices.  This means that nothing other than increases or decreases related to securities should be include.  So no deposits, withdrawals, or transfers in either direction should be included.

I can't understand in the explanation why transfers should show on the graph when deposits/withdrawals do not.  There is no difference as both are just a increase or decrease in cash due to the user adding or removing money from the account and thus are not related to the performance of the account in comparison to the market indices.  The market indices don't include any addition or subtraction due to more funds being added or withdrawn (due to buys or sells in the market) so the graph of the users account shouldn't either.

I agree Kevin but actually the graph is affected by deposits and withdrawals but not by transfers. It should not be affected by any of these.

Sherlock

Quicken Sarah said:

Hi Jim,

Thank you for taking the time to report this.  I've gone through the information provided a few times, the in-product Help article and troubleshooting in my own file and to be honest, I feel like I am missing something.

From the explanation of how the growth is calculated, it appears that the Deposit/Withdraw/WriteChk transactions should not be included in the "Cumul. Net Addition" balance, only the XIn/XOut transactions but the Deposit/Withdraw/WriteChk transactions should correlate to the jump in the graph point on the Growth of $10,000 graph; which is exactly what I am seeing in my test file.

 

  


From my current understanding, the graph does seem to be calculating correctly but if I am missing something, or you are experiencing different behavior, please let me know.

Thanks,

Sarah

I think Jim Harman's point is that your graph should not have the bump.  For what it's worth, the issue does not appear to be present in Quicken 2016 R18.4.  In Quicken 2016 R18.4, the issue with the graph I find frustrating is the mishandling of splits.

Jim_Harman

Arctic Hare (H&B 2019 Canadian) said:

Only transfers-in-kind of securities should come into play; transfers in/out of cash should not come into play.

I'm not sure what you mean by "come into play."

I think transfers of any kind, including cash deposits and withdrawals, should not make the graph jump up or down; it should only be affected by the performance of the underlying securities.

Arctic Hare

Arctic Hare (H&B 2019 Canadian) said:

Only transfers-in-kind of securities should come into play; transfers in/out of cash should not come into play.

Agreed. We are saying the same thing. Come into play = affects the chart.

Changes in security holding balancess should affect the chart. Changes in cash balance should not affect the chart. Transfers-in-kind of securities affect security unit or share balances, not cash balances; therefore, transfers-in-kind of securities should affect the chart.

Jim_Harman

Here's another example:

Say I have an account that has an S&P 500 index fund. Every month I deposit $1,000 and buy $1,000 worth of the fund.

The way the graph is working today, it will show much better performance than the index because each deposit makes the graph jump up. That certainly should not be the intent of the graph.

If instead of depositing the $1,000 I transfer the cash from another account and buy the fund, the graph will match the index (ignoring dividends and management fees). That is the way it should work for deposits too.

Quicken Sarah

Hi Everyone,

Thank you for the additional information and further examples, it helped fill in what I was missing

I've submitted a ticket to Development to request they investigate further.  I went through both QW 2016 and 2017 with the same test file and none of the same graph point jumps occur so there's definitely something in the handling of the Deposit/Withdraw/WriteChk transactions.

I also asked that they return the "options" gear icon to the graph view on the Investing tab so the graph can be customized without having to add it to the Home view.

I'll be back to share updates as they are received on this, thanks!

Sarah

Sherlock

Quicken Sarah said:

Hi Everyone,

Thank you for the additional information and further examples, it helped fill in what I was missing

I've submitted a ticket to Development to request they investigate further.  I went through both QW 2016 and 2017 with the same test file and none of the same graph point jumps occur so there's definitely something in the handling of the Deposit/Withdraw/WriteChk transactions.

I also asked that they return the "options" gear icon to the graph view on the Investing tab so the graph can be customized without having to add it to the Home view.

I'll be back to share updates as they are received on this, thanks!

Sarah

In Quicken 2016 R18.4, the Investing tab's Performance view Growth of $10,000 graph does not have an Options gear but is customized using the pull-down menus at the top of the view.

Jim_Harman

Quicken Sarah said:

Hi Everyone,

Thank you for the additional information and further examples, it helped fill in what I was missing

I've submitted a ticket to Development to request they investigate further.  I went through both QW 2016 and 2017 with the same test file and none of the same graph point jumps occur so there's definitely something in the handling of the Deposit/Withdraw/WriteChk transactions.

I also asked that they return the "options" gear icon to the graph view on the Investing tab so the graph can be customized without having to add it to the Home view.

I'll be back to share updates as they are received on this, thanks!

Sarah

If they do anything with the options, it would certainly be nice if the securities dropdown included "No Security (includes Cash)." Currently the only way to include cash is to select "All Securities" which may not be what you want. That omission may be contributing in some way to the problems related to deposits and withdrawals.

That omission also causes "All securities" to produce different results than "Customize" with all the available securities selected.

One other point on the selections for performance tab:

The date, account, and security selections affect the two graphs on this page but only the account selection affects the Average Annual Return table at the bottom. The end date for this table is always today and all securities are always selected.

I can't think of any reason other than "That's the way it has always been" that the end date and security selections for the table should not follow the selections at the top of the page. 

Jim_Harman

Here is a further update on this problem and another bug I think:

When you are experimenting with Deposit and Xin transactions, it it tempting to edit an XIn to make it a Deposit. Quicken lets you do this, but it creates a broken transfer because the banking side of the transaction is not removed. The effect of this is to hide the problem with the Growth of $10K that we are trying to solve here.

Be sure to delete the transfer and replace it with a Deposit rather than trying to edit it.
 
If you edit the investment side of a Transfer from a banking account to an investing account to make it a Deposit, the banking side of the transfer is left in the banking register.  I did not try it, but presumably this affects Withdraws and XOuts as well. This data corruption is not detected by Validate and Repair.

 

Jim_Harman

Jim Harman said:

Here is a further update on this problem and another bug I think:

When you are experimenting with Deposit and Xin transactions, it it tempting to edit an XIn to make it a Deposit. Quicken lets you do this, but it creates a broken transfer because the banking side of the transaction is not removed. The effect of this is to hide the problem with the Growth of $10K that we are trying to solve here.

Be sure to delete the transfer and replace it with a Deposit rather than trying to edit it.
 
If you edit the investment side of a Transfer from a banking account to an investing account to make it a Deposit, the banking side of the transfer is left in the banking register.  I did not try it, but presumably this affects Withdraws and XOuts as well. This data corruption is not detected by Validate and Repair.

 

Also this is not an issue of the data being correct but the banking register not updating. The banking side of the transfer is still present after exiting and restrting Quicken.

Jammer13

Just found this thread after looking at the Investment Performance page today and noticed strange behavior which turned out to be due to this issue.  In my case, I was taking RMDs for a beneficiary IRA and the withdrawals were all characterized as cash withdrawals and not withdrawal transfers. After reading this thread,  I changed to withdrwX since I had transferred the proceeds to another account and it partially fixed the problem but my withdrawals for tax withholding still skewed the results since they are still shown as cash withdrawals.  

This got me wondering how this should really work.  For example, if you have fees removed from your account, those would likely be shown as withdrawals, and personally I would like them to be shown as a reduction in performance so I could evaluate performance net fees, but then I suppose you would need another transaction type to make that distinction.

Jim_Harman

Jammer13 said:

Just found this thread after looking at the Investment Performance page today and noticed strange behavior which turned out to be due to this issue.  In my case, I was taking RMDs for a beneficiary IRA and the withdrawals were all characterized as cash withdrawals and not withdrawal transfers. After reading this thread,  I changed to withdrwX since I had transferred the proceeds to another account and it partially fixed the problem but my withdrawals for tax withholding still skewed the results since they are still shown as cash withdrawals.  

This got me wondering how this should really work.  For example, if you have fees removed from your account, those would likely be shown as withdrawals, and personally I would like them to be shown as a reduction in performance so I could evaluate performance net fees, but then I suppose you would need another transaction type to make that distinction.

One way to correct for this is to record the tax withholding as a transfer to a banking  account and deduct it there via a split on the receiving end.

If the transaction is combined with the distribution, it would be an XOut of the gross amount then in the banking account you enter the withholding amount as a negative number in the split, leaving the net amount as the deposit.

If it is a separate transaction for the taxes, the withholding would be equal to the transfer amount, leaving a zero deposit.

Jammer13

Jammer13 said:

Just found this thread after looking at the Investment Performance page today and noticed strange behavior which turned out to be due to this issue.  In my case, I was taking RMDs for a beneficiary IRA and the withdrawals were all characterized as cash withdrawals and not withdrawal transfers. After reading this thread,  I changed to withdrwX since I had transferred the proceeds to another account and it partially fixed the problem but my withdrawals for tax withholding still skewed the results since they are still shown as cash withdrawals.  

This got me wondering how this should really work.  For example, if you have fees removed from your account, those would likely be shown as withdrawals, and personally I would like them to be shown as a reduction in performance so I could evaluate performance net fees, but then I suppose you would need another transaction type to make that distinction.

That's a good approach.  I was thinking of creating a separate dummy account to handle transfers and clearing (maybe just I'm over worried about online reconciling of transactions with an existing account), but I think either would probably work fine as a workaround until this is resolved.

Jim_Harman

Jammer13 said:

Just found this thread after looking at the Investment Performance page today and noticed strange behavior which turned out to be due to this issue.  In my case, I was taking RMDs for a beneficiary IRA and the withdrawals were all characterized as cash withdrawals and not withdrawal transfers. After reading this thread,  I changed to withdrwX since I had transferred the proceeds to another account and it partially fixed the problem but my withdrawals for tax withholding still skewed the results since they are still shown as cash withdrawals.  

This got me wondering how this should really work.  For example, if you have fees removed from your account, those would likely be shown as withdrawals, and personally I would like them to be shown as a reduction in performance so I could evaluate performance net fees, but then I suppose you would need another transaction type to make that distinction.

Actually I think you have to use this approach any time taxes are withheld from a distribution from a tax deferred account if you want taxes tracked correctly in Quicken, because Quicken does not include these accounts in its tax reports.