Reinvested Dividend Transactions

jess8887

I’m using Quicken for Mac 2020. Is there a best practice (advantage or disadvantage) to entering reinvested dividends (or interest) as a single line Reinvest Dividend transaction? Or should I separate the reinvested dividends into two transactions, a Deposit and Buy?

I have one broker that separates dividend reinvestments into two transactions (Deposit/Buy), while another using a single line transaction.

I’m going to manually enter my transactions, so nothing will be downloaded. Obviously, single transactions who be simpler. I just want to make sure a single transaction would not impact tax reports, etc.

UKR

(This comment is from a Quicken for Window user ... I don't use Mac)

Since you are not downloading, you can record your reinvested dividend transactions either way.
I would recommend you use the single transaction method ... it's easier.
Doing it either way, single transaction or two, won't mess up the bottom line results and the reports.
If you do record two transactions, just make sure that
recording the cash dividend actually increases your account's cash balance
and
recording the Buy shares transaction decreases it again, by the exact same amount.
When entering transactions, enter # of shares, commission / fees and total transaction amount. Let Quicken calculate the price per share from this, to as many decimal places as it can. Doing it any other way, you may end up with the total transaction amount being rounded off by a small amount ... and that will cause problems with reconciliation.