Entering and tracking US denominated stock transactions in my Canadian Investment account (BMO)

TexCan91

I have US and Canadian investment accounts in Quicken Windows. I cannot download the Canadian investment data from BMO so I'm tracking these manually. Recently made some investments in US ETF's and US Bond funds and now wondering best way to enter these US denominated transactions in a Canadian currency account to keep the correct cost basis.

NotACPA

You can only have, in Q, one currency type in a single account.

SO, your CAD securities must be recorded in a different account than your USD securities.

NotACPA

You can only have, in Q, one currency type in a single account.

SO, your CAD securities must be recorded in a different account than your USD securities.

bonnettd

You can have CDN and US equities in the same account, the problem is that Quicken doesn't have the ability to convert currencies within the account. Basically they are all shown in $$ with no denominations.
So if you are looking to track your cost basis etc then its fine, but it will skew reports and net worth
(windows, home and business)

NotACPA

bonnettd said:

You can have CDN and US equities in the same account, the problem is that Quicken doesn't have the ability to convert currencies within the account. Basically they are all shown in $$ with no denominations.
So if you are looking to track your cost basis etc then its fine, but it will skew reports and net worth
(windows, home and business)

There can be, in Q ONLY ONE currency type in an account.  SO, if you place USD securities and CAD securities in the same account, only the value of one group or the other will be correct. 

Q will either think that the USD securities are denominated in CAD, or that the CAD securities are denominated in USD.  Unless you explicitly specified one currency or the other when creating the account, Q will use the "home" currency for the account ... which is USD for Q US and CAD for Q CDA.

TexCan91

Thanks for the reply, I have split the US & CDN investments into two separate Quicken accounts for now.

Arctic Hare

@TexCan91 - using two Quicken accounts is the requisite approach. I, for example, have an investment account with RBC DI that has two "subaccounts": one subaccount for USD denominated holdings and a second subaccount for CAD denominated holdings. The two subaccounts share a common account number at RBC-DI; I don't/can't transfer between the two subaccounts at RBC DI - because they are not separate accounts from RBC DI's perspective. As far as RBC-DI is concerned, they behave as a single account. In Quicken, I have one USD account and one CAD account that collectively represent the holdings of the single RBC DI investing account.

This all gets a bit interesting when using Norbert's Gambit to convert between currencies, but otherwise works well enough.

Whenever I reconcile the one statement from RBC DI in Quicken Windows Canada, I need to reconcile two accounts. This is easy though because RBC DI reports the CAD holdings (including cash - which it can simultaneously hold CAD and USD) separately from the USD ones on the account statement.

AlexM

I have the same issue and I don't understand why Quicken just can't do currency conversion as it IS supported and there is even provision when you enter a transaction to specify the exchange rate. In my case, unlike Artic Hare at BMO, my investing are in the same account. I will probably setup a 'fake' US account.

AlexM

For those end up here, there is an IDEA for a fix, go vote for it, maybe they will add it as a feature...
https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7882306/quicken-canada-ability-to-convert-downloaded-foreign-security-prices-to-domestic-currency

Arctic Hare

@AlecM: Quicken Canada does handle multi-currency - quite well in fact. However, you do need two accounts in Quicken to represent the one dual currency account at the FI.

My dual currency account at RBC DI is one single account - there is only one account number. It is only on the report that it shows the CAD and USD holdings separately - on different pages (and when buying securities you can see the difference between CAD and USD cash) - but all the holdings, denominated in both currencies, are held all within one, single account. Thus, we really have the same situation: one account at the FI that holds securities denominated in two currencies, which requires two accounts in Quicken (one in CAD and one in USD). I've been using this approach for years and really haven't had any issues with it. The only nuance is that you need to sum two accounts in Quicken to get the value of the one real world account.

I also imagine that implementing multiple currency within a single account would be a major architecture change; it is not a simple/minor enhancement; hence, unlikely to be given much consideration. There is a viable solution available now - using two accounts. The US version of Quicken doesn't even handle multi-currency (unless that is a recently added feature).

NotACPA

"The US version of Quicken doesn't even handle multi-currency (unless that is a recently added feature). "

Q Win US has handled multiple currencies for YEARS. I travel to Europe whenever I can, and I maintain a Euro cash account for the remaining cash that I bring back ... in anticipation of the next trip.

Chris_QPW

NotACPA said:

"The US version of Quicken doesn't even handle multi-currency (unless that is a recently added feature). "

Q Win US has handled multiple currencies for YEARS. I travel to Europe whenever I can, and I maintain a Euro cash account for the remaining cash that I bring back ... in anticipation of the next trip.

They basically got the support at the same time.  There were originally the same code base.  Back in Quicken Windows 6 (1996) you choose which one you wanted during the install.  And neither had multiple currencies.  By Quicken 2004 they both had it (probably before that, but I don't have the older versions in between to check against).

And the support for Canadian was probably "trivial".  They didn't even show a currency sign in Quicken Windows 6.

And in fact Quicken Windows Canadian has multiple currency support locked on, and the Windows version doesn't.  Why?
Because the original base code is "USD", and as such just to support "CAD" they had to have multiple currency support on.

Where @""Arctic Hare (H&B 2019 Canadian)" confusion might be is the fact that it is always stated that the Canadian version has better support for multiple currencies than the US version does.  And that is true.  When they branched off and were developing the Canadian version, there were several enhancements in this area that never made it back into the US version.  Like keeping a history of the exchange rates.
The US version will also not allow importing a QFX file in any other currency other than USD, but the Canadian version will allow it as long as the currency matches the account currency (and sometimes not, which is a bug that also caused the currency of the account to change, when it shouldn't).

I think it is safe to say that Quicken will never get multiple currency support in in one account.

The main reason is because as soon as you mix them, then ever transactions has to carry information about what currency it is.  Which isn't much unlike having different securities in an investment account.