What do I assign a category for sales of mutual funds in a brokerage account?

Bert Onstott

I have sales of mutual funds that show up as un-categorized transactions in a spending report. How can I prevent them from showing up there?

Jim_Harman

There is no category because like a transfer between accounts you have not made or spent any money, you have just moved money from the mutual fund into cash.

If you withdraw money from the account using one of the Cash transactions at the bottom of the dropdown list when you click on Enter Transactions, you can assign a category at that time.

Tom Young

"I have sales of mutual funds that show up as un-categorized transactions in a spending report. How can I prevent them from showing up there?"

I assume the Account that holds the mutual funds is selected as part of your spending report.  Indeed, that has to be the case because that Account is "feeding" that transaction - "Uncategorized" -  to the report.

Frankly, I don't understand how this could be happening, assuming you're using the "Sold" action to effect the sale in Quicken.  The Sold action creates the following accounting entry within the investment Account:

Debit (increase) Cash (in the Investment Account)

Credit (decrease) Basis in mutual fund sold (in the Investment Account)

Credit (increase) Capital gain (if proceeds > basis in the Investment Account)

Debit (decrease) Capital gain (if proceeds < basis in the Investment Account)

(The "capital gain" entry is the balancing entry; it's positive (income) if proceeds are greater than the basis of the shares sold and it's negative (loss) if proceeds are less that the basis of the shares sold.)

What you should be seeing in the spending report is that "Capital gain" number, irrespective if the cash from the sale is left in the Investment Account or not. 

This all suggests to me that you're entering your "sale" improperly.  How are you entering the sale of the mutual fund, and given that the the transaction involves cash (proceeds), basis (cost of investment sold), and gain or loss, (difference between the two), what number is showing up in the spending report?

Unknown

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Bert Onstott

I produce the report by Reports/Spending/Itemized Categories. When I do, it includes as uncategorized expenses sales of mutual funds in a couple of IRAs and three 529 accounts. The sales are simply that - sales of mutual funds where the cash stays in the account.

It behaves as Intouchwithreality describes. I attached a screen shot (image.png). I can avoid it by using Reports/Spending/Income and Expense by Category. For some reason those transactions don't show up there. I can also exclude those accounts from the report, but that's annoying to have to do.

As for entering the sales, I don't believe I'm doing it incorrectly, but I attached a screen shot (capture.png); maybe you'll see something.

Not a big deal, just thought someone would have a good idea.

volvogirl

Oh is that a sale to pay some fee?  Now you have the cash so you need to enter a misc transaction to use the cash to pay the fee.  Since that happened inside an IRA you don't report the sale on your tax return.  

Bert Onstott

The cash is transferred out of the account. It's used there to pay a bill.

Tom Young

I'll admit I've probably haven't run a Reports > Spending > Itemized Categories report for years but as a test I sold one Bitcoin in my Coinbase.com Account - a non-retirement Account - and then ran that report. 

The correct _RlzdGain from that sale did show up in the Income section of the report. "Uncategorized" was a line item in the Expenses section of the report, showing a $0 total, and that sale was not included there.  What struck me as odd here was that sales of a MoneyMarket fund in one of my brokerage accounts did show up as Uncategorized transactions - with $0 effect as you'd expect.  All in all kind of odd. 

If the sales are showing up as Uncategorized with $0 effect - which seems to be the case - then I'd simply omit the "Uncategorized" Category from the report. And correct that JCPenny entry to properly Categorize it.