"Corrections" made by E*Trade

Perry Smith

Its the new year so its time to clean up last years entries and get ready for taxes.

My E*Trade account creates pairs of entries (about 8 times it seems in 2019). One particular example, the web site says "Interest Type Correction" and they create a -0.02 entry for "Interest Income" and a 0.02 entry for "Dividend Income". The entry with the positive value works but the one with the negative values ends up as an "Uncategorized" transaction.

I was trying to fix this by hand and the GUI won't let me. "Income" must be positive I guess -- which seems like a bad idea but ok...

How do others handle this? My basic objective is to not have anything as "Uncategorized" and it would also be nice if various reports were "correct" ... i.e. the Interest Income from Quicken agrees with E*Trade.

John_in_NC

Correct-the Investments:Interest Income only allows positive amounts.

You can change the transaction type to Payment/Deposit, and then apply a category of your choice so that it isn't uncategorized. This will allow a negative amount.

Perry Smith

I don't understand the Category report perhaps. I can't find how to make the entry so that it goes into the same "bucket" (e.g. Money In => Dividend Income) as a transaction in a "Investing" account marked as Dividend Income.

It appears there are disjoint sets of categories. One that goes into "Money In", ones that go into "Money Out" (which appears to be ALL user created categories), and then the "Other Transactions" which can not be filtered, categories, or separated at all.

And there are other disjoint separations as well because the system created categories used in Investing are disjoint from those used in other types of "Accounts".

Are there ways to get around all this pseudo restrictions?

John_in_NC

Just out of curiosity, are you (investments) in Canada?

Perry Smith

How do I check? They should not be. I'm in the U. S. and as far as I know, every stock is American.

John_in_NC

Don't worry-I was just curious because I recall something odd about getting negative interest or dividends in investment accounts in Canada.

Yes, if they are categorized differently, then the money credited back will be applied to a different category. 

Perry Smith

That's not really my question (at this point). It seems impossible to categorize them the same as where the debit came from.

UKR

I don't know about the Mac, but in Quicken for Windows I would change that "Interest Type Correction" transaction to a Misc. Expense transaction where I can assign the Interest category to the -0.02 amount

If all else fails, delete both the Interest +0.02 and the Correction -0.02 transaction from Quicken. Who needs them ... just my 2cents' worth ...