Three Suggested Improvements (QMac Investments)
I’d like to see a focus on improved capabilities in the investment aspects of Quicken. Such things as a wider variety and increased sophistication of Asset Classes (that should not be too hard) and the ability to determine IRR over specific (and longer) periods of time. Other improvement in investments that I’d like to see would be an “X-Ray” of holdings (aggregating mutual fund holdings by account or something similar-I think QW does this through Morningstar) so you can analyze what you really own.
Another issue in investments is that there is no way to make a dividend tax-free in a non-retirement account. For instance, Muni’s in a taxable account cannot be shown to be tax-free, except by use of tags. To see the total of tax-free income, you must tag each of them as “Tax-Free Dividend” and include them in a report through the tag portion of the customize tab in the new report generator. I’d like to see that changed.
Another thing that really should be addressed is that there is an inconsistency in how Reinvested Dividends and Reinvested Capital Gains are treated. Reinvest Capital Gains cannot easily be included in budgeting. The only way to achieve this right now is to split a Reinvested Capital Gain into two transactions, as Capital Gain Income and then a security buy (as two separate transactions). This is strange because it is not the same as how Dividends are treated, where Reinvested Dividends can be included in the budget in one transaction because the category assigned to reinvested dividends is “Dividend Income”. The category automatically assigned to Capital Gains is “Reinvested Capital Gains” which is not a budget category, and in fact does not seem to exist anywhere else in the program. Note: this might not be bad if someone is starting from scratch, but many of us updating from QM2007 or other programs have hundreds of those transactions and dividing them all into two transactions too time-consuming, so our budgets go without Capital Gains. I expect that this is problematic for those who rely on Capital Gains for their primary income.